What is 'bad design'? 10 examples & how to avoid them

Table Of Content

• My Local University Has A Number Of Human Sculptures On Roofs Of High Buildings, Often Mistaken For Real People
• Prioritize Usability
• Usability: A part of the User Experience
• Funny bad graphic design TikTok channel
• People Have Been Sharing Unbelievable Designs They’ve Seen And Here Are 50 Of The Funniest

We’ve spoken about Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design before. And even though we wholeheartedly agree with them and believe they’re timeless, some of them could be adapted to better reflect how much the world has changed over the last few decades. In short, there are some new nuances that designers should take into account.

My Local University Has A Number Of Human Sculptures On Roofs Of High Buildings, Often Mistaken For Real People

Even the most confident client will hesitate when picking one. These boxes are meant to explain concepts, call to action, or confirm a certain action. In the bad example, the box does not give the option to close the window, and the "Cancel/Create" buttons are too small to create a call to action. While this parking sign is relatively straightforward by LA standards, signs like this are one of the pain points anyone may experience. With this sign, determining whether or not you can park here on a Wednesday morning at 9 a.m. Recognizable design symbols are part of good UX, but context is just as important.

Prioritize Usability

This proves, that some really bad mistakes can be fixed only by changing the typography and adding strokes. Graphic designers producing promotional material and visuals for technical instructions can benefit from having a clear understanding themselves of how the product they're depicting actually works. It also takes talent to create a design so bad, it will make scratch your head and say “What on earth were you thinking? This happens when you neglect to get proper feedback on your designs and take time to carefully examine the applications of a logo design in different situations. Product design (whether physical or digital) has the ability to change how power is distributed in society. This feeds back into the point about how we should all be aware of how our designs can change the world.

Usability: A part of the User Experience

Designs That Look Bad in Real Life, According to Interior Designers - Business Insider

Designs That Look Bad in Real Life, According to Interior Designers.

Posted: Fri, 08 Mar 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

So, if you open up Craigslist on your desktop or laptop and try to resize the window, it will hide a bunch of the content. Its mobile site works well, but nowadays, users expect to be able to access a website on nearly any device and screen size. The problem with Wayfair's homepage is that almost every element is the same size and color and has similar copy and icons. So users are being told to shop for beds and mattresses, vanities, area rugs, outdoor seating, and bedding sets at the same time.

Mirror ceilings you really don’t need

Great Dreams website is giving you a combo of text color and background and that makes the content nearly unreadable. So it’s clear that gamification isn’t necessarily a good thing (at least not anymore), and might be a positive framing of what actually boils down to dark patterns a lot of the time. It might be best to stop referring to gamification holistically and instead refer to the individual qualities of gamified products and the context in which they’re used. Janie Bay is an artist, singer, songwriter, and musician known for the creativity she brings into her songs, whether written or recorded. One of the weird website examples, Janie’s website is a case of bad web design that does little to uphold her brand image.

Lack of Clarity and Usability

Completing this will help you gather actionable insights into obstacles visitors face on your site. Then, you can implement changes based on what you've learned. We will finish with one video showing how bad or not-so-catchy designs can be turned into professional ones by following the principles of design. This hilarious fail case is showing how important is to make print tests before ordering huge amounts of print copies. Looking at your design on a monitor is quite different than the printed version. Printers are using different color systems than monitors and they are placing real paints to achieve your design instead of your visualizations.

Funny bad graphic design TikTok channel

The owners of BULL TITAN US learned that lesson the hard way. The design of marketing campaigns has grown now to encompass a lot more than graphic design. Campaigns often now also include elements of UI and the whole user experience involved in what more interactive initiatives aimed at promoting customer engagement. This kind of marketing has to be well thought through though. Learn the basics of accessibility to create digital products that work better for everyone.

Keep upvoting the pics that you find most amusing, and feel free to let us know in the comments what the worst examples of design you’ve ever witnessed were. Then if you’re interested in checking out even more design fails, you can find some of our previous articles featuring the same subreddit  here, here and here. It takes a talented designer to create something that’s not only practical but looks aesthetically pleasing as well. It also takes talent to create a design so bad, it will make scratch your head and say “What on earth were you thinking? In the screenshot above, some heading and CTA text isn't visible against the image background.

Bad UI Design Examples You Can Learn From

Maybe, this historian of the future predicts the new fashion on web-design in the nearest future. Acid colors, signs, GIFs, and photos of low quality are not really connected to each other. This one-page website is designed to critique and laugh at the ordinary, acceptable and standard ways for organizing space on a website. The website contains the sign in form and a calendar of events at Yale University. This is useful for students and those who are interested in art and would like to join any discussions.On the left side, we can see a navigation bar with certain sections.

You can find our other posts about truly awful design decisions right here, here, as well as here. Sometimes the best way to illustrate the value of design is through examples of bad design. Having lived and studied in London and Berlin, I'm back in native Serbia, working remotely and writing short stories and plays in my free time.

When you land on the website, you have no idea where to start from, you just get confused. Patimex is a great addition to our list of ugly websites – at first, you see plenty of jittery graphics that you need to zoom in and out and they always get out of the screen frames. The concept of various things, blinking on the dark background is OK, but the execution is nothing but annoying. All these products are flashing while you are trying hard to find answers.

Graphic designers should also be promoting their work everywhere. “Getting your work seen on the web is a great place to start,” Flat Icons notes. “You can share your projects on specialized networks like Behance and Dribbble, or with your friends and followers on social media. But don't let this list make you lose faith in the designers of the world; there are plenty out there making the world a more efficient and aesthetically pleasing place too. Their work just won't be shared on this particular subreddit.

But if a client is paying for you to make a sign in Comic Sans and they won’t listen to your advice as a professional, you might sometimes need to compromise. Just make sure the design doesn't get so bad that it can end up on a list like this. A cluttered layout, hidden navigation menu, lack of color contrast, non-responsive design, and inconsistent typefaces are a few hallmarks of bad website design.

For example, a website that is not optimized for mobile devices ignores the significant portion of users accessing the internet via smartphones. Apple’s previous operating systems, including iOS 6, had a skeuomorphic design. In 2013, however, Apple changed to a flat design with the release of the iOS 7. This caused widespread backlash, resulting in different iterations in updated versions of the system. Bad Design is an alternative thinking tool that allows participants to reverse or defy the conventional design process to arrive at a favorable output, often termed as good design. Very often we see that most amateurs end up converting a fully functioning good design into an obnoxious object with the intension of coming up with a new alternative.

Text on the web is not the same as text in a book or magazine. A full page of text with no typographic hierarchy is intimidating to visitors and can bore them quickly. Good design should be internally coherent to the user— it shouldn’t require an external explanation. The concept of jigsaw puzzles apparently eluded the designer of this one. Nilli Sylianteng designed a good alternative sign that combines all the necessary information for drivers to see at a glance.