MetaFilter posts tagged with baddesign

Reasons to wear a helmet

Toekneesan — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:54:41 -0800

The world's worst bike lanes according to readers of the Guardian. The Flickr group where readers submitted their candidates.

Signs, signs everywhere are signs

agatha_magatha — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 07:50:15 -0800

Top Ten Worst Traffic Signs you may disagree, but these are pretty bad and amusing if you don't have to deal with them during your Monday commute. via

Big brains, crap design skills.

stavrosthewonderchicken — Sat, 24 Jul 2004 19:22:52 -0800

Giga Society: the world's most exclusive high IQ society, where an IQ of 196 or higher (one in a billion) is required to join. Not quite as cranially-advantaged? Well, there's always the Oath society, which'll take you if you're only one in a thousand (a mere 150 IQ or higher). Big brains and design skills (or language ones, for that matter) don't mix well, though, it would seem. [more inside]

This is Broken

anastasiav — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 07:55:14 -0800

This is Broken A compendium of bad designs. By Mark Hurst
more inside..

UI Gone Horribly Awry

anastasiav — Tue, 29 Apr 2003 18:12:29 -0800

baddesigns.com -- This is not a urinal. This phone is hard to turn on. This must be annoying. This design could get you a traffic ticket. This guy has too much time on his hands.

Keen — Thu, 18 Apr 2002 15:13:54 -0800

Abercrombie & Fitch Pulls T-Shirts from store shelves! A bunch of "Wong Brothers" and "Wok-n-Bowl" shirts offended some Asians, so they are now off the shelves. The Asians are holding a protest tonight in San Fransico if any mefi members would like to attend. Anyone get one of these before they were pulled? If you did I dare you to wear it to this protest. This geocities site has pictures of all the shirts. I mirrored the site here because of geocities bandwith limits.

mathowie — Sat, 14 Apr 2001 21:51:50 -0800

New April additions to the "Interior Desecrators" gallery of horrific 70's design will leave you in awe (or gouging your eyes out, it's your choice). You'll wonder who on earth would ever use a bathroom like this, if you were child how on earth could you sleep in this room, and why, why, why? It's already 20-30 years behind us, but I distinctly remember looking at my parents' Better Homes and Gardens books like this and wishing I lived in those high tech interiors. Remember to check back each month for updates.

mathowie — Mon, 06 Mar 2000 01:00:21 -0800

Good God, does the Fuji Film website suck. I run tall windows on my monitors, typically 700-800 pixels wide, but around a thousand pixels long, and over half my screen is blank on the Fuji site. Why on earth did they force everything to 500 pixels or so of height? I've never seen a consumer site like this do that before. The other peeve is I bought their smart media floppy adapter, and I wanted to know if there were new Windows2000 drivers for it (it came with Win9x drivers on one disk, and NT drivers on the other). Their support area only lists phone numbers of service centers, no mention of software driver downloads or knowledge bases, or even a FAQ about products. This company does *not* get the web, wake up Fuji Film, it's the 21st century now.

mathowie — Mon, 17 Jan 2000 10:33:32 -0800

Apple historically been at the forefront of UI and HCI research and technology, documenting it in their Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. In the past couple of years however, they've been slipping. They designed the useless round mouse (that requires a 3rd-party product to become useful), the nightmare quicktime 4 interface, and now aqua for OS X. When I saw it at Macworld, there were lots of little things I didn't think were right about it, and Bruce Tognazzini (or Tog for short) has written a great summary of the UI including problems. So what I'm wondering is, why is Apple abandoning their own guidelines?