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Also annoying: Ignoring the "global light" on a Website.

Popular example: The new Ars Technica Design: Background - light from the bottom; Social Icons - light from above. (There are worse examples out there but this just came to my mind first...)

Great example; the new Ars Technica gives me a headache. It's clean, but it is impossible to read and harder to navigate. I've been meaning to redesign it myself for fun.

Although I am not a fan of the fashion, it is indeed possible to create this effect in real life by shooting directly face on from a distance while maintaining orthogonal edges on the sheet. Like any form of forced perspective there are correct and incorrect ways to use it which is where the perceptual problem arises.

For example if the image portrayed is particularly detailed/noisy, then it's ideal to distort it to lend to the fact that the edges are curled towards the viewer (a weaker version of how a label around a cylinder appears distorted.)

This trend has been getting my goat for a while! Such a lame use of pixels to confuse the mind and yield absolutely no cognitive benefit!

Stop Using Curved Drop Shadows