I can't believe I haven't seen this before, it's a slick little PDF with 12 very clever illustrations of common UI patterns used inappropriately, it's the bad usability calendar. They took a calendar UI and applied various UI patterns that we see all the time on the web, including cheap shot at Web 2.0 style rounded-corners-pastel-colored-reflective induced nonsense.

My favorite was this one which inappropriately uses the Apple inspired "Coverflow" pattern to select a date:

Might be worth printing this out and pinning it up on your team's wall just to remind everyone to be thoughtful when they're applying patterns in projects and be cautious of common pitfalls.

This reminded me of a talk Bill Scott gives called Anti-Patterns for interaction design. (Slides here).

I re-read through these slides recently and really think they're great at illustrating easy to avoid usability problems, as Bill puts it:

Sometimes it is most instructive to look at design patterns in reverse-- as a set of anti-patterns. In this talk, I am exploring the common mistakes that designers & developers make when attempting to craft a rich web experience. There are a bunch of counter-examples from consumer facing web sites (both inside & outside of Yahoo!) as well as from enterprise web applications.

I'm going to start reviewing patterns and anti-patterns here on InsideRIA, so if you have any ideas please email me.

Read more from Andre Charland.