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Typesetting Fail


Thanks to Yougli for:

typesetting-fail.jpg

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» 48 Failures in Communication

  1. Bob Dobbs says:

    Fucking MS smart quotes.

  2. Vance says:

    Doesn’t seem that unusual of a typo … does it really qualify as a “fail”ure? Isn’t any typo a failure? It should be a more ironic failure to meet this site’s standard …

  3. Kara says:

    One would think somewhere between ok’ing the ad, printing it up, and putting it up, someone might have said ‘Hey, this doesn’t look terribly apostrophe-esqe, guys.’

    Quite a bit of fail along the way.

  4. CT A says:

    Vance = EPOCH FAIL

  5. Vance says:

    Are you sure you don’t mean “epic”? On second thought, what DO you mean?

  6. Alex says:

    It’s a really bad typo, you have to miss and hit two keys at the same time, or accidentally have the shift down while typing an apostrophe on a Spanish language keyboard setup. (’ and ? are on the -_ key, ‘ key is áccént, / is on the 7, and -_ is on /? key) Either way, someone should probably have looked at it before gluing it to a billboard.

  7. Scott says:

    That’s not a typo. It’s a side effect of Microsoft deciding to ignore standards again. It’s explained somewhat on wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1#The_ISO-8859-1.2FWindows-1252_mixup

    As for “epoch fail”, seek an explanation from XKCD. :)

  8. Alcari says:

    first of all
    XKCD FOR THE WIN!

    as for the pic, you’d think that somewhere beteen the image on screen, test-print, approval, real print, checking, large scale print and putting them on the billboards, someone should have spotted that.

    then again, maybe they all thought it was terribly clever of the advertising agency…

    • Phil-tacular says:

      It is not intended for sure. But it’s the printers fail for not pointing it out, not the typo itself! Who does this?!?!

  9. CT A says:

    Vance,

    You should really read XKCD more often.
    http://xkcd.com/376/

    You fail because you over analyzed EVERYTHING.

    Hence, Vance = EPOCH FAIL

  10. Clear Channel has their grubby little hands in everything.

    http://thebrokenforum.wordpress.com/

  11. lanphuong says:

    Where we tonight shall camp?….The top blogs of the day. the newest report , see and reply me some comments. Thanks.

  12. Kato says:

    This is a major FAIL. I see this poster being placed all over this island. Or maybe its a multiple fail then…
    Didnt know that another guy on Mauritius is reading this FAIL-Blog. Hello there! :)

  13. Carlos says:

    This could have simply been a fail of font. Some fonts don’t have the apostrophy or other symbols and a question mark will go in its place. But you should have at least looked at the type and seen that. And that had to be approved at other levels before it made it up.

  14. Will says:

    I am surprised how these kind of errors can go up to the billboard. Either those people are lazy, or they are complete idiots.

  15. Vance says:

    Thanks for the explanation of Epoch Fail.

    As a former English major, I see typos that bother me all the time, which is why I reacted the way I did. I have actually seen, in the flesh, the word STPO painted on the ground next to a stop sign. (I see someone already submitted a variant on that to this site, so I won’t submit mine). I also used to live near a hotel that advertised ENSP on its sign for about two years before they finally changed it to ESPN. So I guess this seems par for the course for me in terms of dumb human error.

  16. Alex says:

    Vance, if you watch the news, there are a lot of problems because they’re always trying to get stories out immediately and throw headlines on the screen really fast… so there are always a bunch of typos on the headlines or on the crawls below. If you see a typo headline, see how long it takes for it to whoosh away with a swipe effect and a new, corrected headline rolls on.

    Typos are one thing, but they also tend to put accuracy and journalistic integrity to one side to get a story out.

  17. Vance says:

    Not referring to news, but thanks.

  18. JustChris says:

    I’m not sure if this is worthy of WorseThanFailure but it’s worth a shot.

  19. Will says:

    reminds me of chinglish, haha.

  20. lanphuong says:

    Where we tonight shall camp?….The top blogs of the day. the newest report , see and reply me some comments. Thanks.

  21. madi says:

    that sucks like poo

  22. Gravel in my poop says:

    I hate the word “fail’ its already worn out

  23. [...] Typesetting Fail March 19, 2008 – 9:54 pm Thanks to Yougli for: [...]

  24. Anonymous says:

    IT’S THE ALL-CAPS THAT MAKES IT FAIL BECAUSE IT IS DAMN ANNOYING. OTOH A TYPO IS FINE!

  25. Anonymus says:

    I have that car!

  26. j00sh says:

    owning a mitsubishi = fail

  27. Jonny Doom says:

    Actually, this “fail” is a result of a typeface that was made without some punctuation marks. It’s likely that this person used a different typeface before switching it later and not checking it. GRAPHIC DESIGN FAIL.

  28. Anything says:

    #29:

    No, it’s not. The typeface used is Kabel, which does includes proper punctuation glyphs. As allured to by #7, it’s a text encoding fail.

    Likely, the ad was made in some Microsoft application using Windows-1252, and when the printer opened the file, their application for some reason defaulted back to ISO-8859-1, which caused the error.

    Still unbelievable that neither printer nor client even bothered to give a cursory glance, apparently, before printing and distributing the ad.

  29. Jonny Doom says:

    It’s not Kabel though, it’s Decade, which is a bootleg font BASED on Kabel. Check dafont.com

  30. Chill says:

    Ah, funny typo ! It’s not “lancer 1.3 is tougher” but “Cancer is tougher”. Lmaoroflpwnzor.

  31. frostey says:

    That?s a big fail. Who?d forget about what a ?apostrophe? looks like? Fo? shizzle!
    They really should?ve used a different typeface.

  32. need a drink says:

    FIRST!

    Fail.

    I?ve gotta work on my timing.

  33. Anonymous says:

    car hood fail?

  34. Greta says:

    It is the Decade font on the billboard because the distressing patterns are identical; see them on Dafont. I just downloaded the font and tested it. It has no real apostrophe (the one that looks like this: ’ —I don’t mean the vertical, so-called apostrophe, which looks like this: ‘ ). When I type the command for apostrophe, I get an empty rectangle (the one that means missing glyph). I’m guessing what happened is someone designed the ad with a different font which included the apostrophe. Then someone else decided to change the font to Decade, without screen proofing it. The missing-glyph rectangle may have been present in the layout at this time, or maybe the text was rendered in another program which changed the rectangle to the question mark, one like you see on a webpage you view with the wrong encoding. Are there any layout people here that can figure this out? (I had a class in Quark about 6 years ago, but that was my last opportunity to use proper layout software, so I make do with Illustrator.) The hood problem is actually an error in paste-up. The ad sections were not lined up properly. There are two more failures on this billboard. First, the possessive form of “Mauritius” is “Mauritius’s” since it is a singular, not plural, word. Second, this ad is what my graphic design professors call a font buffet. Only one each of serif, sans-serif, and script fonts are allowed in one design, for the purpose of cohesiveness. (Furthermore, the styles are to be co-ordinated; they have to go together nicely.) Not counting logos and the billboard company’s ad, there are three fonts, two sans-serif and one script (the “l” for liter). The billboard company’s has two more sans-serif fonts packed into a little square. There are a lot of failures here. Incidentally, the noun form of fail is failure, and the opposite of fail is not win, here it is succeed. The noun forms of it is success. I have seen a lot of failures on Fail Blog to use the words failure and success.

    • Greta says:

      My vertical apostrophe didn’t show up properly. It looks like the result of Microsoft-Word-style auto-correction. Anyway, I meant the keyboard apostrophe, the one next to the semi-colon.

  35. Olivier says:

    It is NOT a typo/failure/whatever. Read the ad! “LIFE?S TOUGH”. Yes, life is tough indeed, when font/MS/whatever problems lead to typos. This is just great advertising! Illustrating the message with the actual typo.

    Got it ?

  36. Lakvin says:

    Saying the Lancer 1.3 is tough is the true Fail here…

  37. armanrules says:

    life?s tough
    fail
    the fact it comes with a 5 year warranty
    epic fail

  38. Sarah says:

    It’s like it was written via text message.

  39. chocotaco says:

    i accidentally hit the “XD” key…

  40. April says:

    Lets just take a look at the car.. and how a big chunk of it is not attached right on the hood… if your gonna fix up a pic.. do it right!



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