On Friday, Facebook apologized to a Web designer over how its auto-generated "Year in Review" posting feature could illuminate the worst parts of a bad year.

Designer, author, and Event Apart expo contributor Eric Meyer took to his personal blog on Christmas Eve to analyze and scrutinize how Facebook's auto-posted feature went so wrong. The mechanism was designed to digitally scrapbook highly liked and photo-loaded content in order to put a neat bow on users' 2014. But for Meyer, the feature put a glaring spotlight on his own past year: his 2014 was "celebrated" in the above image, which used a photo of his recently deceased daughter, and surrounded it with cheerful iconography.

"Yes, my year looked like that," Meyer wrote. "My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl." He added that the item was "forcefully" displayed in his default Facebook feed, as the option to hide the feature wasn't visually prominent.

Meyer didn't take long to speak about the issue from a designer's perspective, asking Facebook to consider "designing for crisis," as opposed to assuming that its year-combing algorithms would always produce happy, selfie-loaded results. He pleaded to make opting out of such content easier, or at least for Facebook to skip displaying auto-generated images at users by default.

On Friday, The Washington Post printed an apology from Facebook product manager Jonathan Gheller. "[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy," Gheller said.

Meyer confirmed that he received a personal apology directly from Facebook, and he updated his personal blog to clarify his ultimate purpose in bringing the story up. "Taking worst-case scenarios into account is something that Web design does poorly and usually not at all," Meyer wrote. "I was using Facebook’s Year in Review as one example, a timely and relevant foundation to talk about a much wider issue." Meyer went so far as to apologize to the Facebook team responsible for "dropping the Internet on [their] head for Christmas," adding that he believed mainstream outlets reported the story "without the context I assumed the audience would have."