{"id":111813,"date":"2025-11-25T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=111813"},"modified":"2026-02-24T15:55:52","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T23:55:52","slug":"20251125-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20251125-00\/?p=111813","title":{"rendered":"The apocryphal origins of the Hot Dog Stand color scheme"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand theme has been called the world’s worst theme<\/a>, “the ugliest, most abhorrent, most terrifying pile of mismatchery that we have ever had the misfortune to behold.”<\/p>\n

Where did this theme come from?<\/p>\n

Buried in the comments of Jeff Attwood’s tribute to the Windows 3.1 “Hot Dog Stand” color scheme<\/a> is a comment:<\/p>\n

\n

PJ14, Oct 2006<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve actually met the lady who designed Hot Dog for Microsoft. She presented a great seminar on UI design at a UK VB conference (about 1997). She claimed that Hot Dog was a challenge from the Windows 3.1 team to come up with the worst scheme possible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don’t know who PJ14 is, and I don’t know whether this story is true. Just sharing it, and you can decide how credible it sounds.<\/p>\n

2025\/12\/31 update<\/a><\/b>:<\/p>\n

I tracked down Microsoft’s original UI designer to get the true story<\/a>: Wes Felton<\/a> does some (gasp) legwork and gets the facts about the origin of the infamous “Hot Dog Stand” theme from its creator, Virginia Howlett. You might remember the name Virginia Howlett because the last part of her name is the ett<\/i> in the Windows font Marlett<\/i><\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Challenge accepted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-111813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Challenge accepted.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111813"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112086,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111813\/revisions\/112086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}