101 Design Disasters That Had People Wondering, "Who Approved This?"

Bad design doesn’t always have to be offensive to be bad. Brands and designers have made some bad decisions over the years, and some blunders have resulted in quite the public shaming. Take the Tropicana rebrand in 2009, for example. The juice brand renewed its packaging to what consumers deemed “bland” and “generic,” resulting in sales dropping by 20% in just two months.

The design wasn’t offensive or bad per se, but it took away something the consumers were used to. “We underestimated the deep emotional bond they had with the original packaging,” the president at Tropicana North America, Mr. Campbell, explained.

“What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have," Campbell went on. "That wasn’t something that came out in the research. […] Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded.” Tropicana went back to the old design, and the whole ordeal is said to have cost them around $27 million.

GAP had a similar oopsie with their logo back in 2010. The American retailer probably reached some kind of a record for how short their logo was officially changed for — less than a week. Instead of its signature blue square with the white “GAP” inside, the retail giant chose a logo in a Helvetica font and a blue square on the end of the “P.”

The idea behind the new logo was to honor the “heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward,” according to the then-president of Gap North America, Marka Hansen. Yet the public disagreed.

“The addition of the blue square seems to be hated on a united front — it just looks cheap, tacky and very dull,” award-winning logo designer Jon Pink told The BBC. “So whilst including some connection of the original logo makes perfect sense in business terms, this illustrates perfectly that logic and reason can play second fiddle to gut instinct.”

A more worldwide logo fail was the 2012 London Olympics logo controversy. The logo was supposed to represent a jigsaw puzzle and the year 2012, and its creators, who were paid £400,000 for their work, saw it as dynamic, modern, and flexible. However, the public disagreed. People likened it to a scraggly piece of graffiti vandalism, a mosaic of beer mats, and a “broken” symbol of Hitler’s Germany.

Only a few hours after its unveiling, the London 2012 Olympics logo had its own petition to get it changed. 3,000 people signed it in only a few hours, signaling that people felt quite negatively about it.

The public outrage didn’t result in a change of logos. On the contrary, marketing experts and athletes alike praised it for being “dynamic,” evoking movement, and in the words of the former Olympics minister in the UK, Tessa Jowell, “very, very edgy.”

Do you think design needs to be edgy, Pandas? Which one of these design blunders would’ve benefitted from a little less edge, do you think? Let us know your thoughts about the entries on this list in the comments! And if you’d like to see some examples of good design, check out our previous publication about the times designers nailed it and got praised online!