There’s design that’s just plain crappy, and then there’s design that’s maliciously terrible because the creator just wanted you to suffer. They’re related, yet distinct, which explains the existence of two separate subreddits collecting all the worst design the internet has to offer, r/crappydesign and its highly specific offshoot, r/assholedesign.

Whether we’re talking about user experience, packaging or entire buildings, poor design is a whole lot more frustrating when we realize someone’s trying to trick us, shame us, cheat us or just delight in being a giant a-hole for reason.

For example: why would anyone create an ‘alone cam’ for hockey games just to point out people who came solo, especially when they look this dejected? Bonus points for the trollolol Comic Sans, of course. A website selling shoes put a fake hair in their images to make you think you need to wipe your screen off, so you end up hitting ‘shop now’ whether you wanted to or not.

Apple’s clunky converter dongle, necessitated by the ‘space-saving’ lack of an audio port, is clearly absurd. A seemingly 600W power supply is actually just 230W with the model number ‘600W.’ And then there’s the packaging that makes you think you’re getting more food than you really are. It just goes on and on. (There’s a special place in hell for the creators of fake parking tickets.)

Whether you’re designing software or boxes of chocolate, this whole subreddit should be a lesson of what not to do – but hey, if you’re the kind of person who would create this stuff in the first place, you probably won’t care anyway. The rest of us will just keep compiling the receipts and cursing your name.

h/t FastCoDesign

It rains more in Berlin than it does in England, especially during the cold and dreary months of winter, so enticing Germans to vacation in Mexico with a cloud that literally rains tequila is probably pretty effective. And this isn’t just a cloud-shaped installation that pours a mist of tequila out of a showerhead or something equally predictable – it’s a real cloud of tequila condensation that turns liquid in response to vibration, timed to coincide with real-life rain outside.

United States-based creative agency LAPIZ teamed up wit the Mexico Tourism Board to create an ad specifically tailored to boost German tourism to the sunny, margarita-soaked nation. Installed in Urban Spree, a Berlin art gallery, the project mimics the look of natural clouds by containing condensation within a cumulus-shaped sculpture. You can see the mist rolling off the cloud in Instagram videos of the installation.

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A flash of lightning heralds an oncoming tequila storm, and onlookers gather to hold a shot glass under the cloud. It’s the third year in a row that Lapiz teamed up with the tourism board to get Germans to Mexico, and it seems certain that this would be their most successful effort yet. Who doesn’t like free tequila? “This time, we combined the Mexican thing Germans love most, tequila, with the type of weather they like the least, rain, and created the Tequila Cloud,” they explain.

The same ad spaces that shouted about insurance and laundry detergent last week now contain nothing but fluffy cats, as an art collective uses the internet’s number-one obsession to temporarily transform the London Tube system. The Citizens Advertising Takeover Service (CATS) is the result of a Kickstarter campaign by brand-new collective Glimpse aiming to “create a rip in the space time continuum.”

The group raised enough money to buy all of the ad spaces in the Clapham Common station – a total of 68 – for a two-week period, and the new posters feature cats from the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and the Cats Protection charity. The organizers are careful to note that they’re not against advertising per se, but rather hope that the project will “inspire people to think differently about the world and realize they have the power to change it.”

But the broader point – and appeal – of CATS is the citizen takeover of public spaces, with everyday people getting to decide what they want to look at as they navigate their cities. Wouldn’t you rather be surrounded by what essentially functions as an ad for animal rescue services than dozens of posters pushing a bunch of junk corporations want you to purchase?

“Back in February we asked ourselves to ‘imagine a world where friends and experiences were more valuable than stuff you can buy,’” says Glimpse founder James Turner in a post on Medium. “The team began thinking about crowdfunding to replace Tube adverts with something else. Beautiful forests? Time spent with family? Hmmm. We wanted this to become famous, so we needed something the internet would love. Frame it that way and the answer’s obvious. Cats.”

“We’ve been on the news in China, and one of our backers is flying in from America to see his cat in one of the final posters. This project has uncorked a kind of energy that I haven’t experienced before. When you talk about CATS, eyes light up and new ideas start to flow. We don’t know exactly how Glimpse is going to work, but we want to carry this energy with us as we grow up.”

Tokyo seems inseparable from the banners, billboards, logos, slogans and other flashy neon alerts, except when seen through the lens of this French graphic designer in a startling black-and-white image series turned into a alternating GIFs.

Tokyo No Ads by Nicolas Damiens illustrates just how shocking the contrast is, particularly when switching back and forth between before and after versions. Each of the seven scenes here was meticulously edited with attention to every last pixel of graphics.

To outsiders, Japan’s capital is nearly synonymous with signage saturation, so stripping them away changes the character of the place dramatically. Promoting everything from TV shows and movies to local shops and businesses, it is almost impossible to find a place in the city not showered in advertising. Perhaps the biggest surprise: the landscape almost looks more alien without its characteristic adverts.

This billboard, reportedly spotted in a subway station in New York City, may not be the most tactful way to drum up business for a funeral home. But you have to admit, it’s clever. Naturally, the funeral industry doesn’t have too much trouble with supply – everyone dies eventually – but they have to compete with each other just like any other business. Are the ads that manage to stand out in poor taste, or just bringing a much-needed sense of humor to the realities of death?

The Devanny-Condron Funeral Home in Massachusetts raised a few eyebrows with this billboard congratulating a local resident on her 100th birthday. Conflict of interest, anyone? In Florida, the Beckman-Williamson Funeral Home & Crematory used a little dark humor to get attention in the form of ‘Thank You for Smoking’ lighters.

These ads are funny, sure, but probably not helping diffuse the public perception of the funeral industry as a bunch of vultures lurking around waiting to pick at people’s bones. That’s especially true considering the hundreds of suicides and murders that take place on subway tracks, and the millions of smoking-related fatalities. But other ads seen as insensitive – like the one below, touting funeral pre-arrangements as a romantic Valentine’s Day gift – are simply trying to call attention to a basic fact of life that most people ignore until the last possible minute.

Attitudes about death vary wildly between cultures, religions and geographic areas, so it’s no surprise that what one person finds incredibly tacky is greeted with a smile and a shrug by another. The mere existence of cell phone-shaped caskets is enough to testify to that fact.

And while it’s easy to laugh at things like Compton’s drive-thru funeral parlor (complete with bulletproof glass) – which many people see as cheapening the lives of the dead, making the mourning process as casual as grabbing a burger and fries – perhaps there’s more to it than that. After all, your attitude about death would probably be different if you lived in a place where drive-by shootings happen on a near-daily basis, and gang-related cemetery shootouts aren’t uncommon. If you’re interested in the demystification of mortality, check out the Order of the Good Death.