Because I’m at a loss to explain it, myself.
How did nobody manage to spot this before the banner made it to production?
Maybe someone’s been watching too many late 1970s movie musicals. Sure, both towns are named LaGrange—but this is a bit much.
There are some places that probably shouldn’t include bloody hand prints in their Halloween office décor—for instance, an urgent care clinic.
I don’t know about you, but I go to the trauma center to get stitched up, not to spill what’s left of my blood all over the front windows.
By all means, decorate the office and get into the All Hallows’ Eve spirit. Just make sure to do it in a way that doesn’t instill even more fear into the injured people coming through the door for help.
(Photo courtesy of Val Williams)
Concise, easy-to-understand instructions can mean the difference between success and failure—or even between life and death. In emergency situations, for instance, our reasoning abilities diminish. We just want to get out alive. Our brains are in crisis mode, not think-and-reflect mode.
When we create text to accompany life-saving equipment, it’s important that even terrified or badly injured people can understand it in a millisecond. How we phrase these brief instructions can determine whether our readers live or die.
Here’s a great example courtesy of my sister, who was traveling for work when she snapped these photos. Continue reading
Blue Ridge, Georgia—21 May 2010
Workplace signs are among the funniest I’ve seen. They almost never mean to cause confusion, but when they do, the result makes my day. Or makes me weep for humanity. Or both.
This one is courtesy of my sister, who saw it in a Denver area women’s restroom. Continue reading
For the second time this week—and I’m not sure how it happened, so please don’t point fingers, index or otherwise—I happened across this article on Yahoo! News [sic]. Boxer Floyd Mayweather is serving a 90-day jail sentence in Las Vegas for beating up and threatening his ex, with whom he has three children. Continue reading
The other day, I stumbled across this Who Knew? article from Yahoo! News [sic] on long-lasting celebrity marriages. Nothing in there surprised me—I already knew about Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, Mark Harmon and Pam Dawber, et cetera.
No, what really gave me a laugh was the comments section.
So we’ve got Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. Who’s missing?
Oh, right.
Behold the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: Stupidity. Or maybe his name is Marketing Coup. I’m not sure. Continue reading
Everybody tweets about the weather, but nobody does anything about it!
Everybody is also on the social media bandwagon, and nearly nobody has the sense to know when they shouldn’t be. To prove my point, here’s Exhibit A: The Weather Channel. Continue reading
Several weeks ago, my tech comm classmates and I had a long discussion about logotypes. Which logotype would we recognize anywhere? To what did we ascribe its power? Was it designed well? Or just ubiquitous?
At first, I had a hard time thinking of a well-known, instantly-recognizable font. Irony of ironies! Finally, though, it came to me:
Figure 1: The old Wal-Mart logo, discontinued in 2008, still appears on the store's plastic bags in some markets.
Well, why not? Continue reading