The silliest, funniest and downright rudest festive fails spotted by Reddit users.
December is here, and that means that a lot of people around the world have started putting up their Christmas decorations. While it's traditional to wait until 8 December in some countries, many people today start to decorate as soon the month begins (or as soon as Halloween is over if you're a high-street retailer).
And with the decorations come the inevitable Christmas decoration design fails, of which we've seen many. Reddit has been a veritable depository of Christmas design fails over the years, from illegible window stickers to questionable angel candles and... er, 'fuckering lights'. Below we round up some of our favourites from the past ten years, along with the festive lessons we can learn from them.
Starting off our list of Christmas decoration design fails, a wonderful piece of tautology from the product department. Looking for a present to stuff in someone's stocking shaped stocking? Then look no further. There is a possible explanation for this one, maybe. I presume the brand perhaps also makes bells in other shapes. All the same, this made me chuckle. Every time a bell-shaped bell rings and angel-shaped angel gets its wing-shaped wings, one person jests on Reddit.
The terrible kerning in this Christmas decoration design fail was so good it made it to our pick of the worst design fails of all time. The lesson here should be pretty obvious. There's more to getting type right in packaging design than just choosing the font. A little kerning to add space between the 'L' and the 'I' would have been a good idea here.
A festive mug design here... I think. Or maybe it's left over from Halloween. Despite the X-Files having appropriated the 'I believe' line, we presume this is supposed to refer to Santa, who appears to have been slaughtered in a terrible bloodbath. Perhaps it's merchandise for CSI Lapland. There's a lesson to be learned here. Christmas isn't the only thing associated with the colour red.
Novelty candle designs are notorious for causing unintended hilarity due to their tendency to form suggestive shapes, and Christmas-themed designs tend to be even more risque. It seems impossible the designer didn't realise how this looked (or that everybody else was too polite to tell them).
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Holidays like Christmas tend to bring out everyone's inner love of wild experimental type. But making the message on your window sticker illegible isn't clever; it's just perplexing. The aim here seemed to be to create some kind of symmetry with the huge 'C' and 'S' at either end and the mirrored 'R' in the middle... No, I'm just trying to be generous; I don't know what they were thinking.
Christmas means lights. Lots of them, anywhere you can out them. But I think this Redditer was very sensible in deciding to leave this banner turned off. The demon reindeer is enough to cause many a nightmare before Christmas.
Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
