73 Cringey Design Mistakes That Made Signs Incomprehensible

Even if you’re not a graphic designer, artist, or creative professional, you can immediately tell when a sign or book cover is ‘off.’ In a nutshell, visual communication needs to be as brief and clear as possible.

You need to pick a good font, make sure the colors don’t clash, and that the kerning (that’s the space between characters) doesn’t confuse your target audience or create some unfortunate letter combinations.

At its core, good signage leads to greater visibility and professional credibility, and better brand awareness and recognition.

You have barely a moment to transmit your message to your target audience. So, if there’s any messiness or confusion in your design, you’re already failing at your task. If you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or content creator, you are pushing potential customers away and harming your brand, reputation, and profitability.

However, some failures are so egregious that they deserve to be called out. The ones that we’ve compiled and featured here are examples of what to avoid doing at all costs.

How you represent your brand, business, product, or services visually likely creates the very first impression your target audience has of you. To put it bluntly, if that impression is unfavorable, you’ll have a tough time attracting customers.

If your sign’s a mess, your posters are confusing, and your logo is unreadable, why should your customers trust you over your competitors? In other words, a lack of visual clarity raises questions about your overall quality. And, stating the obvious, you don’t want your customers to raise these questions about you. You want to instantly create a positive impression of trustworthiness and quality.

Good design means creating quality work within certain constraints.

Clarity and brevity aside, brands should also try to make their advertising interesting, catchy, and fun. So, designers should definitely toy around with the font size, colors, kerning, etc., while still keeping things simple and readable.

You also have to keep the brand’s overall identity in mind when working with signage. Some visual design ideas might be objectively great, but they might not work well with the company or clients you’re currently working with.

To be clear, everyone makes mistakes. Even veteran industry professionals. So, it’s never a good idea to publish the first draft of, well, anything, no matter how confident you feel about it. Take a break, spend some time away from your design, then look at it with fresh eyes.

Changing the medium through which you review and edit your work also impacts any potential mistakes that you notice. Switch to a different screen. Print out your work and look at it on paper. Do whatever you need to do to distance yourself from your work and look at it from a fresh perspective, as your target audience would.

You also need to be open to editing your work based on feedback. Ask your colleagues, family, friends, and complete strangers for their honest opinions on your work. Then, hone in on the constructive criticism while ignoring unhelpful feedback.

No matter how amazing you are at your job, true professionals recognize their limits and the value of getting impartial viewers’ opinions. (Even if their comments can sometimes be tough to take!)

The inspiration for the DDOI online group comes from the massively popular TV series ‘The Walking Dead.’

The show had a promotional poster that, due to the bizarre spacing, warped the message written on a door. The signage here was so hilariously bad that it became a meme and spread online.

The DDOI online community is practically legendary by now. It has been calling out hilarious and nonsensical visual design fails since 2014.

Now, nearly 12 years after the group was started, it continues to draw in a massive crowd of gawking internet users and people eager to call out bad signs. At the time of writing, the subreddit gets 36k visitors per week.

The essence of the DDOI online group is sharing visual designs, signs, posters, and other examples of text that, when read regularly from top to bottom and left to right, end up confusing, nonsensical, and funny.

The subreddit revolves around English posts, and the mistakes should be instantly obvious. The moderators who run the group that the community should avoid forcing anything or posting something that could be easily faked or staged.

Meanwhile, posters are encouraged to share the incorrect way of reading the text in the title of their post.

Which of these hilariously bad sign fails made you wince and cringe the hardest, and why?

What are the worst examples of visual media that you’ve personally seen in your local area? In your opinion, what can all creative professionals do to become more self-aware of the quality of their work?

Share your thoughts with all the other readers in the comments.