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Signs, advertisements and billboards are a weird game. Every joke advertisement is a bit of a risk. Some are dumber than others. Sometimes a sign's pun game is simply too strong. Some advertising fails, like the magazine layout fails are total accidents. Sometimes signs are just straight up scary.

We like to think there's some set of rigid standards that applies to all products and advertising, but the reality is that most companies will just do whatever they can get away with. That leads to some devious and horrible products designed to manipulate people. Seriously, a lot of products are designed by jerks.

The world is rife with manipulative and awful products and ads, and it's worth it to point them out when they're clearly unfair. There's wildly misleading labels, sandwiches made to look like they're twice as big as they actually are, and apps that make you pay money to delete them, just to name a few. It makes you start to think this stuff could be designed by the devil.

Soulless people will do anything to make a quick buck. They'll make uncomfortable standing airline seats to save on space, charge people to go to the bathroom, advertise a cheap product and charge a hundred dollars for shipping, literally hide fine print by making it the same color as the background, and do even more devious BS when they think of it. These are examples of deceptive and crappy products. Like seriously, these were designed by the devil.

Ads and packaging make stuff look like it's gonna be fantastic. I mean, sure it's the job of a commercial to make a burger look like the be-all-end-all of burgerdom. But when what you get is so different from what was advertised, you can't help but feel like you've been had. Here are some times when reality got the best of people's expectations.

Some of these are kind of cool. Some of these are a little shocking. Some of them are gross. Some of them are straight-up weird. Post World War II America was a place of seemingly endless prosperity. How this attitude resulted with ads for putting Mayo on pears and putting chow mein in a can, we'll never know. The snapshot of the past is interesting enough, especially with some of the stuff here that never caught on.

If you had any doubts as to whether you were good at your job or not, then have no fear. These failures are examples of someone else's amazing mistakes. So be glad you aren't the dude who put some stairs in upside down or made your storefront inexplicably filthy. People do this a lot.

This is either terrible or great marketing, we're really not sure. Everybody's looking at the ad, but we're pretty sure not too many people are buying the tightest shirt to every squeeze onto an Asgardian. We're big fans of when facebook gets ahold of something, like that time that guy with the huge neck got destroyed by everyone.

Signs, ads and products that could've used some more thought. Some are weirdly inappropriate, some are creepy as hell. It's weird how people never seem to get better at this stuff. Anyway, we're happy they don't.

The people who make bathtub trays seem to be under the impression that the people who buy them are in search of a lifestyle of elegance. Sharon Su investigates this incredible phenomenon in the thread below. Also, it looks like they used the blue drink twice. Huh.

What happens when people don't review their work? Misplaced toilets, stairs to nowhere and advertisements that look like living nightmares. Some of this stuff was planned, but still turned out to be crap anyway! And boy are we glad it happens.

The truth is, this stuff is child's play. Here's some darker and dirtier design fails to really get your motor running.

Sometimes you distort someone's features to an impossible or freakish degree, sometimes you forget to erase a naked man in the background. All in a day's photoshoppin'.