Harry Brignull
Harry Brignull started a website in 2010 to name and expose deceptive interface design. The site was darkpatterns.org and the phrase it introduced, dark patterns, became the standard label for designs that steer people into choices they would not otherwise make. The site now runs as deceptive.design and prefers the term deceptive patterns, after advice from the Tech Policy Design Lab.
Who they are
Brignull is a user experience practitioner. The site's own about page says it was started in 2010 and that it was born out of his concern about a growing problem, and that he was inspired to start a campaign that would expose these patterns and educate the public. The vault's record dates the registration of darkpatterns.org to 28 July 2010 and holds that it was a pattern library with the explicit aim of naming and shaming deceptive interfaces.
What distinguishes his contribution is that it came from outside the research literature. The first systematic academic study of the vocabulary, by Colin Gray and colleagues in 2018, collected its 118 examples from places such as social media, design blogs and news outlets, and four of them came from darkpatterns.org itself. The researchers who followed worked with a phrase that practitioners had already put into circulation.
Key papers
Brignull has no entry among the papers this site cites. The work to read is the site itself, Deceptive Patterns (formerly darkpatterns.org), and its about page, which gives the 2010 start date, the purpose of the campaign and the change of preferred term. It is cited in the sources of the article on dark patterns in web design as a primary record of the coinage.
Key ideas
The idea behind the site is that a deceptive design deserves a name, so that a named pattern can be reported, collected, compared and regulated. Gray and colleagues (2018) reported that practitioners applied the term to a wide range of ethical concerns and often conflated them. Mathur, Kshirsagar and Mayer (2021) identified 19 definitions in academic work, law and policy that differed on which elements were required.
The vault's record adds that the vocabulary has since moved into law and regulation, including the European Union Digital Services Act and the California Privacy Rights Act. That claim comes from the vault's earlier verification record and was not re-opened for this page. Article 25 of the Digital Services Act, which the dark patterns article quotes, does not itself name a technique; it describes interfaces that deceive or manipulate users or impair their ability to make free and informed decisions.
Sources
- Deceptive Patterns (formerly darkpatterns.org), About page, deceptive.design/about-us, read 28 October 2026. Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018), CHI 2018, doi:10.1145/3173574.3174108, for the sources of the 118 examples. Mathur, A., Kshirsagar, M., & Mayer, J. (2021), CHI 2021, doi:10.1145/3411764.3445610, for the 19 definitions. The 28 July 2010 date and the regulatory uptake are from the vault's note on Brignull, created from User Friendly on 2 October 2026.