Hall of fame — no. 2
Larry Page and Sergey Brin's homepage stayed bare partly because they didn't do much HTML.
▶ GOOGLE · 1998
GOOGLE · 2026 ◀Drag the handle — Google, 1998 → 2026.
The ugly part. Two Stanford PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, ran their search engine off university servers under the name BackRub. The 1998 homepage was a logo, a box, and two buttons — part design choice, part the fact that they weren't web designers.
Why it worked. With nothing to load, the page was instant — and the results were simply better than anyone else's. Bare wasn't a phase to grow out of; it was the product telling you it was fast.
Now. The front door to the internet for billions of people, and still essentially a box on a white page.