Gave Me A Stroke”: 81 Truly Horrible Designs That Deserved To Be Shamed (New Pics)

Legendary designer Dieter Rams came up with 10 fundamental, iconic principles of design that continue to shape how many creatives approach projects today.

His principles are:

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally-friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible

The beauty of Rams’ principles of good design is that they are nearly universal. They can be applied even to our digital landscape and app design, too, not just building interiors and product designs.

That being said, there are no such things as timeless rules. Even Rams’ principles might need to be (slightly) adapted and adjusted, and possibly even expanded with so many changes in the tech industry.

Meanwhile, you have to account for people’s tastes and preferences as well. Not every design—however balanced between function and form—will appeal to every customer. But just because someone doesn’t like what you’ve made doesn’t make your design ‘bad.’ There’s simply a disconnect between what you’re offering and what someone else wants and needs.

And yet, this should not be an excuse for pumping out low-quality designs by claiming that someone, somewhere, will still enjoy them. If you are a designer or run a design business, you need your products to be commercially viable. And that means appealing to more than tiny niches of consumers with bizarre tastes. Without (semi) mass appeal, your business won’t last long.

During an earlier in-depth interview, international freelance graphic designer Laura Vanagaite, who specializes in branding and social media content creation, walked the Bored Panda team through design failures.

“We judge design work anyway for its design, and our eye catches mistakes very fast,” she told us previously.

“Our brain needs less than a second to bring up a judgment, and way more time to rationalize on the topics of ‘bad’ and ‘good,’” the graphic designer told Bored Panda earlier.

“Once we spot a mistake, we tend to stop collaborating with the agency or brand because we believed that they are more reliable and able to deliver a good result. If the final result is made with mistakes, you definitely don’t want to waste your time to clean up a mess again and as well pay for the badly done service.”

From the graphic designer’s perspective, for any business, building trust with their customers is vital.

There can be various reasons for poor designs. For example, it might be due to a breakdown in communication. Or the designer working on a particular project was less skilled than the team assumed.

“When most people hear ‘human error,’ they do not see the details; they see the person who is completely to blame,” the graphic designer explained to Bored Panda. “But this should always be foreseen by the manager who is in charge from the beginning.”

“When you hire an expert in any field, you expect that things will be done the right way and that the mistakes that you would have made won’t happen. If it is a team, it means that the project manager did not pay attention to the final design and just approved it without looking, which shows a lack of professionalism and also not caring too much about the client and the project.”

“To define the role of the client and designer, from the beginning there should be a clear brief from the clients' side and as well the designer should come up with the most important questions which will be solved in the design process,” Vanagaite told the Bored Panda team.

According to her, the designs are reviewed either by a board or with the project manager.

“Once everything gets approved from the management part, then it can be sent to the client to receive either corrections or the complete approval.”

She noted that communication is absolutely vital here. Designers shouldn’t be left to work alone throughout the process. “It is teamwork and the support both from the management part and the creative part that is a must.”

The ‘Bad Designs’ online group, active since the spring of 2016, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Over the past decade, the community has been inviting people to feast their eyes on the “horrible designs of humankind.”

They wittily note how the subreddit is “a place to show spelling mistakes, poor гeadaьiliтy and overall bad designs!” The members of the community are known in the group as “bad designers,” while those currently online are jokingly referred to as “designing something bad.”

The moderators running ‘Bad Designs’ ask that the community members only post designs that are very visibly, obviously bad. If it’s not clearly in plain sight, it shouldn’t be posted. What’s more, the mods emphasize that designs that are purposefully made to be bad or funny shouldn’t be shared in the group.

Once you’ve upvoted the pics that you loved to hate the most, why not share your thoughts in the comments? Which of these designs hurt you the most, and why?

What have been your biggest personal creative work-related fails that still make you wince and cringe with embarrassment to this day? Let us know!