Dark Patterns

The Labs catalog the rules. The Deviations catalog the moments when breaking a rule is justified. Dark Patterns catalog the moments when breaking a rule is the whole point — when the interface is engineered against the user it claims to serve. The taxonomy is Harry Brignull’s, coined in 2010 and curated since at deceptive.design. The empirical backbone is Mathur and colleagues at Princeton CITP, who in 2019 scraped eleven thousand shopping sites and found nineteen hundred dark patterns in the wild. The legal scaffolding now exists too: the EU Digital Services Act explicitly bans several of these patterns, and the United States Federal Trade Commission has begun enforcement.

This wing exists because honesty about the craft requires honesty about its abuse. Every pattern below is a real, named thing that real, paid designers ship every day. Naming them is the first half of refusing them.