As a graphic designer, I feel I must point out to many folks here that there's a difference between a design you don't like and a design that isn't good. A design that isn't good fails to achieve or works against its intended purpose, while a design you don't like is just one that features things that go against your personal sensibilities.
For example, probably 80-90% of billboards in existence are horribly designed. Realtors being the worst offenders--those people couldn't design a good billboard if you threw one at their smug, grinning faces. Billboards are things that most people see from a great distance away, while in motion, and with most of their attention focused on other significantly more important tasks. You simply cannot load down a billboard with a paragraph of information and expect anybody to comprehend it, or even attempt to. Yet so many people--especially realitors--like to put the whole damn company's mission statement up there, PLUS a phone number, PLUS a captioned picture, PLUS their big ass logo. It's just too much, and the visual clutter is going to make people just glance over it.
The maximum number of words you want on a billboard is five, or seven if you REALLY just can't help yourself. But five is really the sweet spot between communicating the information you need and not running away the eye with clutter. However, the best billboards are usually the ones with no words at all.
As much as I hate those billboards that just say the word JESUS in the style of a streetsign, I can appreciate them in that at the very least their creators understand the principles of making a good billboard. They go against my sensibilities, but they're well designed.
Another thing that goes against my sensibilities but is well designed is the JCPenney logo. A while back they got a new CEO and went to this [http://slant.investorplace.com/files/2013/11/jcp-stock-jc-penney-logo.jpg] one, but they went back to their old CEO and so went back to the old one [http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120127045126/logopedia/images/4/45/JCPenney-Logo.png]. I liked the newer one much better--it was a nice little icon, fit with their "fair and square" pricing motto, and just looked newer and fresher. But the old one is certainly not a BAD design: Helvetica is a great font, it's become recognizable as being JCPenney's font, and its simplicity allows it to be used in many ways and situations without their designers having to bend over backwards to make it fit.
So...yeah. Just because you don't like a design doesn't mean it isn't good. And just because you like a design doesn't mean it's good: I keep seeing a desire for color and gradients and 3D effects and the like, and like with billboards you simply can't inundate an interface with a bunch of extraneous crap. Simplicity is most often the master key to usability. Get too much crap in there and the eye doesn't know where to go, and can't differentiate the different sections of information because there's too much color and texture masking the finer details.
