40 Unfortunate Designs By People Who Had No Clue What They Were Doing, As Shared By This Online Group

The 'Unfortunate Design' online community welcomes all fellow design aficionados eager to ridicule and discuss the examples they find online or in real life that are not necessarily horrible but somehow managed to miss the mark. If this is your cup of tea and you already have some pictures of disappointing designs in your camera gallery waiting to be shared with the world, don’t be shy!

But before joining the group, though, there are some important rules you have to be aware of. The first and most important one is already in the name — posts must feature an unfortunate design. Or, as the moderators clarify in the sidebar, "Posts must display an unfortunate design that was not intentionally made to appear misleading or be misunderstood."

Needless to say, people looking after the group ask its members to be civil and avoid name-calling or fight-picking. And, obviously, there’s no place for racism or violence on the sub. Furthermore, low-effort or irrelevant titles are simply a no-go. "The title of your post must be descriptive and relevant to the post contents," the mods added.

As you take a brief scroll through these regrettable and obnoxious objects featured in the list, be prepared to feel your toes curl. Whether intentionally or not, this online community shows us that some designers opt to completely disregard every single principle of good design by making the end users suspicious, annoyed, and even frustrated. And let's not forget the confusion, something that inevitably builds up when unfortunate solutions create more problems than they solve.

But why do these examples stand out like a sore thumb? Well, there's a plethora of information stating that one of the main reasons we believe badly thought-out design is all around us is because it is simply more evident.

Just think about it, we often manage to miss examples of good design, even when they’re staring us right in the face. This happens because it usually follows us around like a friendly invisible ghost, quietly improving lives while not getting in the way of the user. But as you've already noticed, bad designs do the exact opposite.

Alice Rawsthorne, world-renowned design critic and author of books Hello World and Design As An Attitude, believes there’s simply too much of the not-so-good, the bad, and the ugly. She said while taking to the stage at the Design Indaba conference in 2019: "Very little design is actually great, very little of it is even any good, most of it is mediocre, and an enormous amount of it is damn right bad."

According to her, it’s only by better understanding how badly executed results happen in the first place can creators find it easier to avoid making mistakes when thinking of their next big project. Rawsthorne outlined 8 main categories that would help people identify failures: pointless, useless, lazy, thoughtless, ominous, untrustworthy, offensive, and good intentions but…

In an interview with Design Boom, Rawsthorne explained that bad design in itself doesn’t have value. However, she believes that there’s also the magnifying glass effect at play — poorly executed solutions can be called out and used as a cautionary tale.

"Apple did overhaul its relationships with subcontractors after the exposes of supposedly exploitative employment practices, it has made recent efforts to improve its environmental record," the critic said, adding that companies will start thinking much more carefully about the products they launch in the future. "And that can only be good."

But another problem designers seem to face today is that too much stuff gets released into our vast world. "[Design is] an industry that was driven by production and demanding consumers. And undoubtedly most people still see design as a source of all the plastic trash that’s clogging up the pacific, rather than a genius way of removing it, and enabling us to live more responsibly."

"Designers now have an opportunity and I think a responsibility to challenge that," Rawsthorne continued. "But that will be determined by the quality of the solutions that they develop. Design is instinctively and inherently a resourceful and resilient field that’s constantly evolved over time to adapt to new challenges and changes. So there are commercial opportunities, as well as personal and moral opportunities in all these new areas."

At the end of the day, it’s up to creators to come up with intelligent, appealing, effective, and efficient ways of dealing with issues that arise in the modern world. And as critic Rawsthorne added, the one thing they need to stop designing badly, it’s to think.

"This is an extraordinary period when design really has an exciting opportunity to play a much more powerful role in our lives. But that will have an impact on the design solutions that are developed or have a quality that proves that designers deserve to do so."

Rawsthorne believes it’s absolutely vital for designers who are embracing the challenge and aiming to work on very important problems in today’s world "rise to the challenge by dealing with them with intelligence and sensitivity because otherwise if they fail, it will be much, much more difficult for design to convince people that it should be entrusted as part of the solution to such issues in future," she concluded.