Everyone loves a good 404 page. Once a backwater of Web design, these pages are used to tell site visitors when they’ve reached a broken link. But a good 404 page can inject some unexpected humor and levity into a user experience that’s invariably dull and confusing. Publishers get that as well, and a few have truly upped the ante.
“I think that with anything you make, you should care about all the details,” said Bloomberg chief digital content officer Joshua Topolsky, who helped design one of the more unique 404 pages in recent memory for Bloomberg Politics. “This is just a little thing that we thought deserved consideration. Why not do something fun with it?”
To be sure, Bloomberg Politics isn’t alone. From Complex to Clickhole, here’s a look at some publishers’ more interesting, creative and downright strange 404 pages out in the wild:
Complex layers on the Kanye
Clickhole’s version of the Fail Whale is, well, a Fuck-Up Frog
The New Yorker digs into the archives
Vox: Let us explain
USA Today’s FTW scores on a fumble
Meow you see me, meow you don’t
We see what you did there. Nerds.
Over at the Dodo, unicorns. Obviously
Funny or Die goes for the not-actually-that-funny, low-hanging Al Gore fruit
NPR: Here are some other missing things
Bloomberg outdoes itself
More in Media
AI Briefing: How political startups are helping small political campaigns scale content and ads with AI
With about 100 days until Election Day, politically focused startups see AI as a way to help national and local candidates quickly react to unexpected change.
Media Briefing: Publishers reassess Privacy Sandbox plans following Google’s cookie deprecation reversal
Google’s announcement on Monday to reverse its plans to fully deprecate third-party cookies from its Chrome browser seems to have, in turn, reversed some publishers’ stances on the Privacy Sandbox.
Why Google’s cookie deprecation reversal isn’t actually a reprieve for publishers
Publishers are keeping a “business as usual” approach to testing cookieless alternatives despite Google’s announcement that it won’t be fully deprecating third-party cookies after all.