How to Create a Terrible Design

Written by David Charney
Posted: January 5, 2008 (4 years, 1 month ago) | 1 comment

“The best terrible design is the design that no-one sees” - Anonymous

A lot of of people say to me, “Dave, I see so many terrible designs on the internet. How can I too create such terrible designs?”

Great question. You have to understand that it is not as hard as you might think. There are several characteristics that go into terrible design. Here is a quick list of the usual reasons people fail at terrible design:

• They use their client’s brand standards
• They spend the time to understand the goals of their client and the audience that will be using the design
• They use strong design techniques
• They use color theories
• They worry about usability, quality, and spelling
• They understand developing the UX and a RIA
• They replace all lorem ipsum copy with the actual content
• They actually develop the look and feel in Photoshop rather than “as they go”

All the above are professional mistakes a great novice tends not to make. And don’t think terrible design stops at the user interface. The best terrible designs go much further.

Consider these additional possibilities:

• Have a few random images that don’t load
• Force the most popular pages to display a database or bandwidth error
• Make your design only work on specific browsers
• Try building a site that doesn’t let you use the mouse to get around
• Use any image you find online and don’t worry about scaling it up to fit

Before I show you the process I use when creating a terrible design, I must talk about not getting yourself into the design community. It really is a waist of time for a terrible designer. Do a search and you will find plenty of design events going on in your area (your area may vary - if it sucks you won’t find any events). Put these events on your calendar and don’t go to them. There are also a lot of online forums that you should think about not visiting.

TIP: A lot of great terrible designers don’t show their work to their clients until after the due date.

TIP: If you are going after a Spanish speaking audience, and all you have is English, don’t spend all that money on having it converted professionally. There are a lot of great online translators that will get it “close enough”. Remember, the best comment you could ever hear is “It’s not that I like it or I don’t, it’s that it’s bad.”… If you ever hear this, you have achieved a terrible design.