Build the Ugliest Page
Tuesday November 28, 2006
So many Web design contests ask you to build the best looking page you can, but sometimes building something ugly can help people to understand non-ugly design better. After all, if you know what makes something ugly, you can avoid that and make the rest of your site pretty in comparison.
Image courtesy leonbidon from StockXchng #518018.
So the challenge this time is to build something ugly. You should build a new page for this competition, not just submit an existing site. (Although, if there's interest, I will set up a separate challenge to submit the ugliest existing sites on the Web.)
Image courtesy leonbidon from StockXchng #518018.
The Rules
- You can do whatever you want with the HTML on the page - just make it ugly.
- If you feel you need to explain why your page is the ugliest, please do so in the content of the page.
- All designs that you create are yours to keep and you retain all rights to that design, you only agree to have a screen shot taken of the design and a link to the page will be on this site for voting.
Fill in this form to submit your design. Submissions are due by midnight on December 17, 2006. Voting will begin within a week after that.
Have fun!
Comments
Funnily enough I entered a competition similar to this! We humans are truly capable of some horrible things (:
Sounds like fun, but a bit harder than it first seems. My main criteria has always been elegance and ease of use. I accept the challenge.
Leslie: you’re so right. It can be very hard to deliberately write an ugly page. A few years ago for this site, I put up an ugly page design and I’ll be including it in the challenge as well, unless we get a huge number of responses.
This is very true!
Thinking about ugly pages and especially ugly HTML, hopefully this contest will become harder as the spread of standards-based designs encourage browser developers to discontinue support of ugly code. - Jeff Rechten
Hi Jeff: Have you visited any sites lately?
My limited experience tells me that we’ll be living with ugly pages and ugly HTML for a long time to come, but maybe I surf in “bad neighborhoods” 
i entered the contest yeay