This is part 7 in the chronicles of building HR Partner, our latest web app.

A short one today. I was designing the 404 and 500 error screens for our Ruby framework, and decided to go outside the box a little.

Usually, the 404 error page is a fairly boring affair, telling the user that they have tried to load an invalid page. I thought to make it more interesting, I would incorporate an ever changing background for the error pages.

I am using a dynamic CSS background for the error pages, which links to unsplash.it to load up a random grayscale image as the background.

This way, every time that a user hits an error page, they will still get the large '404' or '500' error number, but overlaid on a different background each time. I have no control over what image gets shown, but I find myself just hitting invalid pages every now and then during my development routine - just to see what pretty landscapes show up.

The body style tag looks something like the following:

<body class='black-bg' style='height: 100%; background:url(https://unsplash.it/g/1000/800/?random) no-repeat fixed center center;'>
  ... rest of 404 error info
</body>

So as I said - error message certainly do not have to be boring!