Arngren: The Most Chaotic Web Layout Ever Built

Arngren sells mini scooters, remote control helicopters, hunting knives, walkie talkies and roughly nine hundred other things, all of which are visible at once, on the homepage, overlapping. There is no grid. There are perhaps eleven fonts. Images sit on top of each other at slight angles. Prices appear in red, in blue, in a yellow that no monitor was designed to display. It is, without exaggeration, the most famous badly designed website in the world, and it has been in continuous operation for decades.

What is Arngren?

Arngren is a Norwegian retailer of gadgets and vehicles. That description is accurate and completely fails to prepare you. Load the page and you are hit with a solid rectangle of product photographs packed edge to edge, captions in mixed languages and sizes wedged into every gap, and no white space anywhere. Nothing indicates where one product listing ends and the next begins. Nothing indicates what the site is for. You simply arrive, mid-catalog, and must fend for yourself.

The temptation is to assume it is a joke, an art piece, or a deliberate stunt. It does not appear to be any of those. The likeliest story is far more interesting: this is what a catalog looks like when it is edited continuously for twenty-odd years and never once redesigned. Add a product, put it wherever there is a gap. Add another. Repeat until the page is a geological record of everything the shop has ever stocked. No template imposed order, so no order emerged.

For web designers, Arngren is a teaching artifact. It gets used in lectures and blog posts as the canonical example of what happens without visual hierarchy, and it is genuinely useful for that. Everything the textbooks say about whitespace, alignment, consistent type and grouping related items is demonstrated here in the negative, all at once.

But the joke has a second half, and the second half is on the designers. Arngren has been profitable enough to keep running for decades. Countless immaculately designed e-commerce startups with grid systems and thoughtfully considered type scales have launched and folded in that time. The lesson people take from Arngren is “this is bad design”. The lesson available from Arngren is that design is one variable among several, and the site is a permanent, blinking reminder not to overrate your own.

There is also something genuinely nice about it. The modern web is templated to the point of interchangeability, and every shop looks like every other shop. Arngren looks like a place run by a person. A person with unusual ideas about layout, but a person.

What can you do on Arngren?

• Look at the homepage. This is the main event. Give yourself a full minute before trying to make sense of anything.
• Try to find a specific product. A genuinely humbling exercise in navigation, and the fastest way to understand what hierarchy is for.
• Count the fonts. Nobody has agreed on a final number. The attempt is part of the experience.
• Follow a category link. The interior pages are, remarkably, sometimes worse than the front page.
• Use it as a design argument. It ends debates about whitespace faster than any slide deck.
• Notice the products themselves. Underneath the chaos there is a real and pretty entertaining inventory of gadgets, vehicles and tools.

Tips to get the most out of it

Do not try to browse it like a normal shop. You will fail. Treat it as a picture to look at rather than an interface to use, and it becomes much more enjoyable.

Zoom out in your browser. Pressing Ctrl or Cmd with the minus key reveals just how far the page extends, which is considerably further than you assumed.

Check it on a phone. The mobile experience is its own separate adventure and worth seeing at least once.

Look at it in the Wayback Machine. Archived versions from previous years show the layout accreting over time, which is the best evidence for the “grew organically” theory.

Show it to a designer. The reaction is reliable and immediate, and the conversation afterward is usually better than the one you were having.

Resist the urge to feel superior. The site has outlived a great many tastefully designed competitors. That is a real data point.

If you like Arngren, also try…

• Ling’s Cars: the British equivalent, a car leasing site with even more happening per square pixel.
• The Million Dollar Homepage: a single page sold pixel by pixel, preserved as a chaotic time capsule.
• Cameron’s World: a collage built entirely from salvaged GeoCities pages.
• User Inyerface: deliberately terrible interface design, as a game you have to beat.

More beautiful disasters in Weird & Wonderful, and the sober counterpoint in Design & Creativity.