A mock up and a recreation of one of my first 404 pages.
I love creative 404 pages! The problem is that if your graphic designer and/or web master have done their job right, you will never get to see them. Most companies do not even bother making their 404 pages creative, because of this fact; which is what I discovered when I started researching different companies for this blog post. To be more specific, the majority of the companies’ 404 pages that I brought up were just a generic 404 message, with very little creative thought put into it.
I remember one of my first creative 404 pages. It was for a local Christian bookstore, and it featured a picture of a cave with the caption “The tomb is empty and the page you are looking for is not here.” In my opinion, it was very creative, but because I had done my job well, no one got to see it. So in this blog, I decided to do my part to make sure that some of these creative 404 pages get to see the light of day.
The following, in no particular order, are what I consider to be excellent examples of 404 pages. (Only the first two on the list were originally designed by me.) Please note that as of the writting of this blog (July 2019) all of the links below work, since I only hold control over the first 404 page on this list (aka mine) some might no longer work like they did in July 2019.
- Square Bubble Design's 404 Page (My thought process here was simple, bubbles pop.)
- NRCM's 404 Page (My thought process here was also simple, squirrels eat acorns.)
- Amazon's 404 Page (Be sure to refresh this page)
- Zurb's 404 Page
- Google's 404 Page
- Facebook's 404 Page
- Pantone's 404 Page
- Pixar's 404 Page
- 20th Century Fox's 404 Page (Be sure to refresh this page)
- Marvel Comic's 404 Page (Be sure to refresh this page)
- DC Universe's 404 Page
- Kualo's 404 Page
- Figma's 404 Page
- Air BnB's 404 Page
- Lego's 404 Page
- GitHub's 404 Page
- MailChimp's 404 Page
- Dropbox's 404 Page
- eHarmony's 404 Page
- Carwow's 404 Page