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By: Eric Singley On the service, it may be difficult to see how a web design contest can be seen as Culture Jamming. But when the contest was created by Stewart Butterfield, whether he knew it or not, he made one of the most powerful anti-commercial statements the Web has seen.

Just to give you an idea of how small 5k is, Google, popular because of it's sparce design and powerful functionality, weights in at over 15k. The motivation for the contest was the corporate "bloat on the Web." This space should be a place for people to share information. But as the potential to make big bucks with this new medium grew, the mom and pop web sites were shoved to the side and web design became all about "commercial design for big companies." Butterfield decided to show the world that pure design on the web hasn't been lost,

and the potential to create pure, commercial - free spaces was still alive and well. While many of the pieces submitted were artistic in nature, the contest's winner fittingly, was a spoof e-commerce site. Commercial Free Spaces: Second place winner: iris Contest creator's site Overall contest winners Web's Smallest Art Museum