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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Fugly Friday: Old school website atrocities from Microsoft

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Back when I graduated high school, most websites hadn't begun thinking about design terms like glossy, grungy, or even "not a complete trainwreck." Heck, plenty of them didn't give aesthetics a second thought. Or a first one, for that matter.

It's no secret that Microsoft has some skeletons in their design closet. Hot Dog Stand will haunt them until the end of time. Less talked about are the early designs of the Microsoft web site, which reside at the corner of Retro Street and Fugly Avenue.

Recently the cool cats at Royal Pingdom dug up some real beauties. The screenshots go back as far as April 1994 and they remind me why I didn't care about using a browser that supported images back then. I love the first example - to me the shape resembles a cheap CD after you break it in half. The halftone sunburst and field of stars? Pure win.

Fugly Friday: Old school website atrocities from Microsoft originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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