This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about entrepreneurship, design, experience, simplicity, constraints, pop culture, our products, products we like, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago.

Sandy 21 Sep 06

Borat’s page keeps us laughing HARD at work. It hits it just right: perfectly bad web design :-)

fet 21 Sep 06

Classic bad-on-purpose, the Crumpler Bags site:

http://www.crumplerbags.com/home.php

ryan schroeder 21 Sep 06

remember Rubber Burner? and the other sites lee jeans did back in 2000(?). classic, and very funny, bad design.

foodswami 21 Sep 06

borat is hella funny, Im glad to see that you fellas surf myspace.

you fellas should start a 37signals / svn myspace,

for those of you who dont know, wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borat

Ryan Heneise 21 Sep 06

Whatever you do DON’T click on The Myspaces! (At least, if you do, don’t scroll down.)

Spike 22 Sep 06

Zach Braff’s website is beautiful: http://www.zachbraff.com/

James 22 Sep 06

hmmm reminds me of the classic:
http://webtekrocks.com/

I remember that site from over 4 years ago. Still makes me laugh.

Chriztian Steinmeier 22 Sep 06

Oh, and don’t forget http://www.paulgilbert.com/ - he’s as hilarious as his gutarplaying :-)

Marcin 22 Sep 06

http://www.zajobiste.pl/
promo site of polish movie (and it is written in Rails…)

Lau T. 22 Sep 06

Older spoof IKEA fan site: http://www.ikea-fans.dk/

Notice how the left frame is just narrow enough to provoke horizontal scrolling.

Ralf 22 Sep 06

Oldschool from Germany: http://ars-berlin.com/

Noah 22 Sep 06

Adult Swim recently did something similar: http://www.adultswim.com/index2.html

Daniel 22 Sep 06

Soulwax site is a really clever imitation of the worst (still interesting) real life information design that I know of - unofficial ad boards for music clubs and concerts.

How do people scan these for information? How do they know which thorough encrypted and spasmically drawn poster is actually worth trying to decrypt? What are the codes for great bad design and just plain bad design that make one poster stand out before the others (except that it’s pinned on top of them)?

I’m really interested. They must work, why would the designers go on if they didn’t? And they do work - people visit those concerts. But how?

Torley 23 Sep 06

What gets Soulwax’s site down for me is the scroll bars—the Aqua just doesn’t work the rest of the thematic!

Sacha Cohen (not to be confused with Sasha Cohen, hehe) is hilarious—Borat reminds me of Mahir as much as Ali G reminds me of Armand Van Helden.

Does anyone know a detailed analysis of why frames faded from popularity? There are few sites with frames I really enjoy using, Bloglines being one of them.

Martin 24 Sep 06

Ripped off from the Ronald Villiers page at the BBC’s Chewin the Fat website, built in 2001:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/tv/chewinthefat/ronald_villiers.shtml

Giovanni 25 Sep 06

Galaxy Quest did it in 1999:

This homage even extended to the original marketing of the movie, including a promotional website intentionally designed to look like a poorly constructed fan website, with “screen captures” and poor HTML coding. This was in imitation of the countless similar websites devoted to Star Trek.