29 Design Fails That Are Ugly And Useless

Alex Thompson

5 hours ago

Looks bad, doesn’t work

What is the deal with this soup bowl? Look at it! It has a rim the size of a landing strip and a hole the size of a thimble. You get two spoonfuls of soup and you’re done! It looks bad doesn’t work. It fails at being a bowl. A bowl has one job: hold the liquid. This is holding the liquid hostage. And the truck in the forest? Who is the GPS for that guy? Lewis and Clark?

We are living in a world where people are designing things with their eyes closed. You have a woman planning a wedding with no groom. That is not a plan; that is a hallucination! And the Beyond Meat packaging? It looks like something from a crime scene. I don’t want my plant-based sausage to look like it needs a forensic team. It is simple: make it look good, make it work. Pick two!

Sometimes a design fails so hard it achieves a special kind of anti-greatness. We have collected the most baffling examples of products, plans, and situations that manage to be both aesthetically displeasing and functionally useless.

The woman walking her baby in the apocalypse sky is the definition of “carrying on.” It is a visual representation of how we are all ignoring the red flags. And that soup bowl is going to haunt my dreams. It is the most inefficient calorie delivery system ever invented.

If you like scratching your head at terrible decisions, there is plenty more failure to explore. Check out design fails, crappy design, and engineering disasters for more functional nightmares.

Alex Thompson has been chronicling internet culture and meme phenomena for nearly seven years. Starting at CollegeHumor and later becoming lead meme editor at Mashable, Alex has covered everything from vintage internet memes like Rickrolling to recent viral events such as Corn Kid and Grimace Shake. With a keen eye for what connects and entertains digital audiences, Alex writes with humor, relatability, and deep knowledge of online culture. At Thunder Dungeon, Alex is the go-to source for meme analysis, viral breakdowns, and internet nostalgia.

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