Every so often, a wonderful thing happens: someone young enough to have missed out on using computers in the early 1990s is introduced to the Windows 3.1 "Hot Dog Stand" color scheme. Back in the day Windows was pretty plain looking out of the box, with grey windows and blue highlights as the default. A number of optional color palettes gave it a bit more pep, like the wine-tinged Bordeaux or the more sophisticated teal of Designer.
And then there was Hot Dog Stand, which more or less turned Windows into a carnival.
"The truly funny thing about this color scheme is that all the other Windows 3.1 color schemes are surprisingly rational, totally reasonable color schemes," tech blogger Jeff Atwood wrote back in 2005. "And then you get to 'Hot Dog Stand. Which is utterly insane. … I have to think it was included as a joke."
If you read the comments to Atwood's article, you'll see some speculation that it's actually great if you're color blind, and then you'll see that speculation debunked. You'll also find a comment from a year later, in 2006, claiming that the creator of the scheme "presented a great seminar on UI design" at a conference in 1997. "She claimed that Hot Dog was a challenge from the Windows 3.1 team to come up with the worst scheme possible," wrote commenter PJ14.
Did Windows 3.1 really ship with a garish color scheme that was dared into being? That was a story I needed to hear, so I went digging for the credits of the Microsoft employees who worked on the user interface back then and found my way to Virginia Howlett, who joined Microsoft in 1985 as the company's first interface designer, and worked there up through the launch of Windows 95.
Howlett also co-created the font Verdana, which is partially named after her daughter Ana and is up there with Helvetica as one of the most-used fonts of the last 30 years. But enough about her world-changing contributions to modern technology: we're here to talk Hot Dog Stand.
"I confess that I'm surprised anyone cares about Windows 3.1 in late 2025! It was such a long time ago and the world has changed so much," Howlett told me when I reached out over email. She confirmed that she and a "small team of designers" created Windows 3.1's themes, which were a "radically new" feature at the time—prior to its release, you couldn't customize different parts of the OS, like the backgrounds and title bars of windows, with different colors.
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Publicity photo from her early years at Microsoft (Image credit: Virginia Howlett)
I asked if the designers at Microsoft really had included Hot Dog Stand as a joke, or if it was inspired by a particular stand they frequented near the corporate campus (hey, it was a longshot, but you never know). I'll let Virginia tell the rest of the story:
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