Comments on: Typesetting Fail

By: trusts

trusts — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:30:04 +0000

they only had a question mark left at the sign shop.

By: ClariPossum

ClariPossum — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:46:31 +0000

At least they hyphenated “5-year.” They earn many, many brownie points for that, from me! XD

By: Nicolas de Fontenay

Nicolas de Fontenay — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:37:46 +0000

To add to the conversation, the ad is located in Mauritius. Iframac is located here:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=iframac,+mauritius&sll=-20.175534,57.486649&sspn=0.24137,0.308647&ie=UTF8&ll=-20.171204,57.482362&spn=0.003772,0.004823&t=h&z=18

By: shehzu

shehzu — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:53:10 +0000

FAIL

By: April

April — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:04:51 +0000

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!

By: Phil-tacular

Phil-tacular — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:25:50 +0000

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

By: blah

blah — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:57:42 +0000

Life? ’s tough…

By: chocotaco

chocotaco — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:53:07 +0000

i accidentally hit the “XD” key…

By: Sarah

Sarah — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:51:27 +0000

It’s like it was written via text message.

By: armanrules

armanrules — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:23:22 +0000

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

By: Lakvin

Lakvin — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:57:04 +0000

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

By: Kaiser

Kaiser — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:42:40 +0000

No, this is an F?ing billboard! ^_^

By: Olivier

Olivier — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:39:03 +0000

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 ?

By: Greta

Greta — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:05:52 +0000

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.

By: Greta

Greta — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:04:02 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 09:49:10 +0000

car hood fail?

By: need a drink

need a drink — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:39:06 +0000

FIRST!

Fail.

I?ve gotta work on my timing.

By: John

John — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:13:57 +0000

You fail.

By: Snopester in Exile

Snopester in Exile — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:35:18 +0000

Oh poop. I meant to reply to Vance. I fail at pointing out failure.

By: Snopester in Exile

Snopester in Exile — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:34:03 +0000

Except this is an F’ing billboard!

By: frostey

frostey — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:42:03 +0000

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

By: Chill

Chill — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:58:50 +0000

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

By: Jonny Doom

Jonny Doom — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:11:13 +0000

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

By: Anything

Anything — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:50:25 +0000

#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.

By: Jonny Doom

Jonny Doom — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:56:45 +0000

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.

By: j00sh

j00sh — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:58:33 +0000

owning a mitsubishi = fail

By: Anonymus

Anonymus — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 16:25:25 +0000

I have that car!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:03:45 +0000

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

By: Zu Beginn etwas Lustiges « Piero´s Medienstrom

Zu Beginn etwas Lustiges « Piero´s Medienstrom — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 18:51:14 +0000

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

By: Gravel in my poop

Gravel in my poop — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:38:38 +0000

I hate the word “fail’ its already worn out

By: madi

madi — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:00:42 +0000

that sucks like poo

By: MessengerBoy

MessengerBoy — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:16:07 +0000

http://www.iframac.mu/

By: lanphuong

lanphuong — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 03:51:30 +0000

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

By: Will

Will — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:36:26 +0000

reminds me of chinglish, haha.

By: JustChris

JustChris — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:35:30 +0000

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

By: Vance

Vance — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:08:25 +0000

Not referring to news, but thanks.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:51:13 +0000

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.

By: Vance

Vance — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:09:43 +0000

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.

By: Will

Will — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:09:32 +0000

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

By: Carlos

Carlos — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:42:51 +0000

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.

By: Kato

Kato — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:04:07 +0000

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!

By: lanphuong

lanphuong — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:20:29 +0000

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

By: The Broken Forum

The Broken Forum — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:13:26 +0000

Clear Channel has their grubby little hands in everything.

—

http://thebrokenforum.wordpress.com/

By: CT A

CT A — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:53:48 +0000

Vance,

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

You fail because you over analyzed EVERYTHING.

Hence, Vance = EPOCH FAIL

By: Alcari

Alcari — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:53:39 +0000

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…

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:04:48 +0000

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.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:47:18 +0000

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.

By: Vance

Vance — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:28:50 +0000

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

By: CT A

CT A — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:37:51 +0000

Vance = EPOCH FAIL

By: Kara

Kara — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:35:42 +0000

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.