50 Times People Encountered Such Crappy Designs, They Just Had To Share

Previously, Bored Panda spoke to the Crappy Design moderators to learn more about their community.

“The original motivation for the subreddit was to point out crappy designs. Nowadays, most subscribers probably come here for entertainment,” the moderators told us that a part of their followers is there just to have fun and gawk at truly ugly design decisions.

“However, it is common to have meaningful discussion here on why or why not something is crappy design,” they pointed out that some of the members actively participate in in-depth chats.

Founded back in 2011, the community has flourished over its 9-and-a-half-year existence. Just a year ago, the Crappy Design subreddit had 1.7 million members and got more than 2 million page views each month. Those are huge numbers to be fair. However, since then, the sub has gained an additional half a million new followers.

But let’s hop back to what makes product designs good or bad. For instance, researcher Don Norman writes in his book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ that good design is upfront and honest about what the thing does. No hidden purposes for Norman!

At the same time, he says that designs have to look beautiful and uncluttered while pushing the boundaries of what a particular object means to us. So we have to be innovative but simple while avoiding clutter and mediocrity. Quite a challenge, wouldn’t you think? No wonder there are so many bad designs out there.

Meanwhile, the Interaction Design Foundation stresses that bad designs are often overloaded with useless info and make us waste time to figure out what the thing does and how it works.

So if you’re designing something, make it as intuitive and simple as possible—after all, you wouldn’t want to create something messy that’s bound to end up on the Crappy Design subreddit, would you?