Unpopular opinion: Making shit out of translucent plastic was the single fugliest way to make a product, and I'm glad it's gone.
I agree with you, except for the atomic purple Gameboy Color. That was the shit
I believe that history will remember the atomic purple GameBoy color as the apogee of 20th century design, practicality and classiness.
I hold a grudge against the translucent plastic fad.
Once upon a time the Linux workstation at my desk at $CHIP_COMPANY was built into a noname transparent teal ATX case. For that reason I gave it the hostname "fugly".
We had excessive field failures with some of our chips, and I was tasked with coming up with a way to identify those bad parts at customer sites. My solution was a bootable Linux CD that would run a test and tell the customer if they need to contact us for a recall. The test relied on a modified Linux kernel, so it couldn't be distributed as an application. I used "fugly" to develop and build the test, patched kernel, and CD image.
The test was deployed, the first few customers were pleased, and I got a wood plaque and bonus for my efforts.
A few weeks later, my manager called me into her office looking uncharacteristically pissed off. She asked why I put a message saying "fugly" into the CD. A customer complained about it, saying they saw "fugly" on the screen when the test was running, and while it did it's job it was unprofessional. A split second of confusion before I realized what happened: at boot time the Linux kernel prints the name of the machine it was compiled on, in this case
fugly.team.company.com. It scrolls past quickly on boot, so neither I nor my collaborators ever noticed. Somehow the customer latched onto it.I ended up with a slap on the wrist, being put on PIP for 6 months and having to change the hostname because higher-ups needed their pound of flesh.
Coincidentally, a week after this incident, Toyota posted a billboard at a major intersection near our office advertising the Scion xB that read "Funky? Or Fugly?".
You know what? I'd agree but it's probably for a different reason. Back then I thought this shit was the ugliest thing. Looking back now I kinda miss it but I think it's the nostalgia from it.
It's not even that for me, it's just that now everything looks the same which is boring.
Cars too. In most parking lots, grey, black and white account for 95% of the car colors.
In the US.
This design and use of cheap plastic is disgusting. Design peaked during Bauhaus.
