Why Typography Matters -- Especially At The Oscars (freecodecamp.com) 199
An anonymous reader shares a blog post: There's one thing the Academy possibly didn't consider, or forgot, for this year's winner cards: typography. First, it's legible, you can tell all the letters apart. Second, it's somewhat readable, but the visual weight of "Moonlight" and the producers are equal and blend together. Lastly, even though it is just a winner's card, it's not visually appealing. I think it's fair to say it's objectively bland. That's horrible typography. Of course, anyone could've made the same honest error! You are on television with millions of people around the world watching. You are a little nervous, and you have to read a card. You will most likely read it from top to bottom (visual hierarchy) without questioning whether the card is right. That look on Warren's face was, "This says 'Emma Stone' on it." Faye must've skipped that part and was caught up in the excitement and just blurted out, "La La Land." I don't blame Faye or Warren for this. This was the fault of two entities: whoever was in charge of the design of the winning card (Was it really a design? C'mon), and the unfortunate person who handed them the wrong envelope. A clearly designed card and envelope (don't even get me started on that gold on red envelope) would've prevented this. The blogger, Benjamin Bannister (a creative consultant for old and new media), adds that there were essentially three things wrong with the card in question: Oscars logo need not to be at the top of the card. The category, "Best Acress" was at the bottom, and in small print. And, the winner's name, the main thing that should be read, is the same size as the second line and given equal weight.
Create multiple barriers to failure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Create multiple barriers to failure (Score:5, Funny)
Splash it on a big screen and let the audience read the answer in unison like on Family Feud.
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Put the whole list on a publicly-available web page, and then fix the page if someone notices and reports an error.
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Send an Amber Alert, a Weather Bulletin, and a Tweet to the whole goddam planet.
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Best Picture of 2016, 4 nominees on the board, survey says ????
(evil grin)
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it's already been done. the auditors are supposed to memorize all the winners in all the categories. but word on some TMZ type blogs is that the two partners assigned to the event this year were too busy snapping pictures and looking at the stars and their near naked bodies
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it's already been done. the auditors are supposed to memorize all the winners in all the categories. but word on some TMZ type blogs is that the two partners assigned to the event this year were too busy snapping pictures and looking at the stars and their near naked bodies
True, but memorizing the names doesn't fix giving out the wrong card. All it does is ensure a mistake gets corrected.
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That and the very design changes in TFA were literally the first thing I thought of when I heard about the fiasco. (I had to hear about it, because I can't be arsed to care about the crap that comes out of Hollywood these days, so I was watching something else.)
Seriously, they put the thing that would have just been read before opening the envelope ("Best Actress") at the bottom of the card in mice type? If it were at the top, the error would have been instantly obvious.
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It wasn't "bold easy to read type", but it WAS on the outside of the envelope (though the front I think), even easily visible in the pictures from TV screens.
So I think after Warren realized something was wrong, he had looked at both sides of the red envelope, he would have seen "Best Actress" on it.
BTW, in the discussion afterwards, I did see a clip of Sammy Davis, Jr., being given the wrong card once too -- it was from an earlier category.. (Then he made a joke about the NAACP hearing about this.)
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It wasn't "bold easy to read type", but it WAS on the outside of the envelope (though the front I think), even easily visible in the pictures from TV screens.
So I think after Warren realized something was wrong, he had looked at both sides of the red envelope, he would have seen "Best Actress" on it.
Good points. It does have the award on the front of the envelope; which illustrates how cultural norms, i.e.we write address and names on the front of envelopes, not the back, interferes with good human factors which would place the critical information on the back of the envelope where it would be seen while opening it. The presenters hold the envelope with the front to the audience so they may not see the category before opening, couple that with an expectation they have the correct envelope and you can s
" Faye must've skipped that part" (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong.
There was a whole backstory of Faye and Warren fighting over who got to read Best Picture. Warren eventually conceded to her; he would open the envelope, and Faye would read the name.
When he looked at the card and started stalling, Faye freaked out that he was going to read the name, so she read it as soon as she was able to see the title.
Re:" Faye must've skipped that part" (Score:4, Interesting)
Plus - Warren had apparently presented two times before, had a rough idea what he was looking for; you can see his confusion. Faye apparently had never presented before, had less of an idea what should "look" right. A quick glance at the card, she saw and read the title.
Plus, the category is as the article mentions, in tiny type at the bottom of the card. Presumably both these old fogies were not wearing their reading glasses. (76 and 80 years old) The category may have been the least readable part of the card, as well as not being prominent.
Another point was the envelope exterior had the category as gold foil on deep red, rather than the traditional deep red on gold... Making the category even less readable on the outside, assisting in the mix-up.
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A quick glance at the card, she saw and read the title.
The last bastion is the human reading it. Let not poor typography or color choices excuse not taking caution to read the whole thing before announcing. There were several failure points here, not just one. If we are going to rightly lay some fault at the accountant for not handing out the right card envelope due to being not paying proper attention, then Faye also rightly deserves some for not paying proper attention. Perfect typography won't prevent someone from reading part of the text and ignoring the re
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Perfect typography won't prevent someone from reading part of the text and ignoring the rest.
Of course it will, that is how typography works. Font sizes, colours and placement all help guide the eye to the important parts of any text. If you've ever marked up some text you'll know how useful some circling of words or a highlighter can be to put emphasis on the important bits
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Well, yes and no. While few may actually care what won best picture, more might find the idea of this type of human error involving a simple task finding its way into an such an expensive, over produced media event to be interesting. Poor procedural planning, a cellphone distracted starstruck flunky, and now poor typography. I guess we now know what could go wrong.
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And literally no one cares.
Aside from the fact that your English is atrocious, you're talking about the defining moment in someone's career being overshadowed by a scandal. Not only do people care like the winners and those who lost their jobs, but you're also an arse for claiming no one does.
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Whether or not "literally" just means literally, it definitely does mean mean "figuratively" either, and I've seen some awful blunders from people trying to hypercorrect under that assumption, ala:
"...so since I was too drunk to study I ended up getting figuratively the lowest grade in the class!"
"Wait, what is 'lowest grade in the class' figurative of?"
"Oh you know, I just mean like, it wasn't like LITERALLY the lowest grade in the class, just, y'know, a pretty low grade."
Non-literal uses of "literal" may
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Whoops, typo (Score:2)
it definitely does mean mean "figuratively" either
Should be:
it definitely does not mean "figuratively" either
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Since the word has literally changed meanings, it seems to me that you can now use it literally or figuratively. There is literally no reason to abandon it.
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Documenting an incorrect usage doesn't mean it is valid to use that.
It'd be like if, after several decades of use, some committee sponsored by drive makers rightly sued for false advertising, declared that 1KB instead of 1024 bytes suddenly means 1000.
A word with two distinct meanings in the same domain is worthless.
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Yes, it means exactly that. Or do you still use 'awful' to mean 'inspiring awe' and 'terrific' to mean 'causing terror'? Does 'cleave' mean to join or to separate? Do you put on your napron when cooking, or do you put on an apron like the rest of us?
Language is living, and it changes. Get used to it.
And your drive size example is quite ironic. 'kilo' meant 1000 LONG before it ever meant 1024. By your standards that change should never have been allowed.
Obligatory Dilbert (Score:2)
Lawyers must love you. "I can lie any way I want to because the meaning of words changes."
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Language is living, and it changes. Get used to it.
This is a weak argument that gets really overused. While it is true that language changes over time, this does not mean that it doesn't have rules. Language is a means of communication after all, and it only functions by means of some agreed-upon standards. When those standards are violated it means miscommunication, and shrugging and saying, "language changes," does not resolve that problem.
People fight over the word "literally" a lot, and while you could certainly argue that fighting over any word is r
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What does that have to do with anything? Your argument (incorrect as it is) was that a word with two meanings in the same domain is useless, and should not be allowed. The prefix kilo (from the greek for thousand) has been applied as a prefix to all sorts of things for 200 years. Meters, liters, pascals, volts, ohms, amperes, etc. And it ALWAYS meant 1000. But, for some magical item called a 'byte' it suddenly doesn't mean that anymore? Do explain.
When 'KB' meant 1024 bytes that was largely just techn
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You understand that the prefix "kilo" means 1000, right? And this predates the "kilobyte = 1024 bytes" shit by MILLENNIA. Right?
Stop trying so hard to misunderstand the point.
"kilobyte" has ALWAYS meant "1000 bytes", according to the standard SI prefix system. Defining it as 1024 is a temporary anomaly based on the coincidence that 10^3 ~= 1000.
Hate on "kibibyte" all you want (I hate it too), but it is the modern, standard definition now.
So fucking what. What are you a
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Whoops, obv. I meant 2^10, not 10^3. :)
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In that case the dictionaries are exponentially wrong.
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Literally + really = litereally.
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Viral Marketing? (Score:3, Interesting)
When I first read the story on the front page of basically every newspaper, my immediate thought was that it was a publicity stunt. Maybe it wasn't, but I know that I - and many of my friends - didn't care about the oscars this year until that story popped up. Whether this was 'fake news' or not, we are most definitely entering a strange new world, where information is more readily available than ever, but more unreliable than ever.
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From what I've heard, one of the PwC accountants was busy tweeting backstage. He was distracted and handed Warren the wrong envelope. The rest is now Oscar history.
Re: Viral Marketing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Trump's speech this week had more viewers. They need to do something especially when they give the biggest award to a terrible movie just to be PC. The top review on IMDb for it has four stars. That doesn't deserve best picture award.
Hindsight (Score:2)
Re:Hindsight (Score:4, Insightful)
As I told my son after he fried my laptop a couple of days ago (plugged the power cable into a USB slot because he wasn't paying attention), it's not whether you make a mistake or not, it's whether you learn from it. In my son's case, it's "pay attention when plugging in electrical devices." In PwC's case, it might be "don't tweet while handing the envelopes out" or "design the envelopes/cards to more easily convey their information."
Re:Hindsight (Score:4, Interesting)
>plugged the power cable into a USB slot because he wasn't paying attention
How??!
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Lenovo thinkpad power connectors are very USBish.
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The USB port is right next to the power port. (This is a 3 year old Toshiba Satellite L-70A.) That USB port had previously lost the little plastic tab that the USB leads usually rest on. My best guess is that my son jammed the round power plug into the rectangular USB hole and one of the USB leads entered the power plug, completing the circuit.
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>plugged the power cable into a USB slot because he wasn't paying attention
How??!
Probably the same way as my dad did when I was home for Christmas. Lots of USB charger adaptors have two ports on them, spaced just far enough that the blades of a power plug will fit in them, but not well or all the way. My dad struggled with that for a good five minutes trying to get it properly plugged in before I looked at it and told him what he was doing wrong.
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You'd think at some point a Lenovo engineer would go "This looks kinda like USB. We should make sure it won't fry anything if someone tries to shove it into a USB port."
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He would have totally designed this card right the first time. PWC probably just had some low level employee
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I believe it was all on the 2 employees (who are now banned from working the Oscars). It's been reported that they were the only ones allowed to have knowledge of the winners - they were responsible for everything, beginning with tallying the votes, through handing out the envelopes.
Why The Oscars Matter ... (Score:2)
... umm, well, uh, ..., you see, ... er ...
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They don't.
So we should just shut them down and send all the people who work for them to design cockpit interfaces for Boeing.
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I don't think they'd take them back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"The dials on the two vibration gauges (one for each engine) were small and the LED needle went around the outside of the dial as opposed to the inside of the dial as in the previous 737 series aircraft."
I think they're working at slashdot, in fact. Some useless twat has apparently broken anchor tags.
Re:Why The Oscars Matter ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Idiot Proofing... (Score:3)
...can help a lot, but let's keep in mind that there is ALWAYS a better idiot out there.
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That doesn't mean we should make it so easy that every idiot gets a go.
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Never underestimate the persistance of a determined idiot.
"unfortunate person"? (Score:2)
It is being reported that Brian Cullinan, who handed out the wrong envelope, was distracted because he was tweeting on his phone despite having been warned not to do so. If this is true, he was negligent, not unfortunate.
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it is design not typography (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:it is design not typography (Score:5, Informative)
Because: Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed (from Wikipedia).
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Why we keep talking about typography? It was a really bad design of the card, not an issue of fonts used.
If you clicked TFA it even helpfully points out the definition of typography. Then maybe you would realise why typography and bad design on this card are the same thing and why we keep talking about it.
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Typography is part of it but it's not the whole issue.
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So it's a part of it. Now you know why we're talking about it.
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Two posts up, you claimed it was ALL of it.
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I'd say putting the title - the thing that does the semi-important job of telling you what it's all about - at the bottom isn't very clever whatever font you use.
Good advice to apply in practice (Score:5, Insightful)
The article makes a very persuasive case, one that I think many of us can apply in our work as well. You don't have to be a graphic designer or work in graphic design to be able to extract these principles and apply them to your profession.
1. Mitigate the chance of error across every step in the process. Build in fail-safes. The media has placed the lion's share of the blame on the PwC accountants, and it's fair to say they were largely responsible ("you had ONE job"). But there are other steps in the process, ways of building in fail-safe mechanisms, as this article demonstrates.
2. Anticipate the impact of human error. Having two accountants, two sets of envelopes, having them memorize the list of winners, is a good thing, but we see here that this failed because when the awards ceremony is live, people might not be as level-headed as they would normally be. There's a lot going on, and the possibility of error as a result of distractions is greater. Ironically, having multiple sets of envelopes is part of the reason why this error occurred, so there must be careful thought toward building the aforementioned redundancy in a way that doesn't inadvertently create additional modes of failure.
3. Good communication design always places the most important piece of information front and center. This is true whether you work in traditional print, or new media design, or user interface design. And the need for effective design is very frequently underestimated or overlooked entirely.
You can argue that this was just an awards ceremony, rich people patting each other on the back, yadda yadda. Fine. But what I'm interested in is how we all can use this event as a learning experience in our own lives.
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You forgot:
4. Typeset the EULA in all caps, so nobody actually reads it but you can still claim later that you made it clearly stand out as being important.
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The biggest part of the "human error" factor was that the PwC guy who was passed out the envelopes was spending his time on his smartphone, tweeting to his followers. That, more than anything else, led to the mistake.
You can debate about fonts and typography all you want, but if the person who is responsible for handing out the correct envelope is too busy tweeting "OMG THE OSCARS ARE SO COOL! #iamcooltoo" to pay attention to his job, then mistakes are going to happen.
Yes, but there are two different things going on here:
The guy with the envelope screwing up. Yes, that would not have been avoided by any typography.
But it would have been NOTICED that the guy just screwed up. THAT would have been the advantage of good typography. One more line of defense.
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But what I'm interested in is how we all can use this event as a learning experience in our own lives.
Here are the lessons:
a) unexpected stuff happens in life. roll with it.
b) some unexpected stuff happens in life that might be avoided if you spend obsessive attention to details. No matter how much time you spend obsessing over details there will be something that you just didn't think of.
c) spending obsessive attention to detail is not always the best use of our time or money. if you are building a new space suit for astronauts, spend obsessive attention to details.
The rabbit hole is bottomless.
How much wo
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When I first heard this I was wondering how the envelope for a category that had already been announced could be used again. At the last category there should be precisely one left, right? Reading around a bit I suppose the envelope given was one of the red herrings printed to prevent leaks.
The solution then is simple. Write the category clearly on the envelope, perhaps with a number indicating the sequence. Whe
On a related note (Score:2)
This is somewhat adjacent topic. A philosophy professor once told me that one should put much care in choosing syntax for a logic and its mathematical models. If the readers' main problem is hacking through your syntax, you have done him/her and yourself (when you try to read it later) a disservice.
It isn't just choice of fonts. If a subscript in one font means something and a subscript in another font means something else, then you should consider not overloading subscripts with both kinds of information..
More than typography, procedures (Score:3)
If I understand correctly, there are two sets of identical cards, so that whichever side the stage is entered-from, the relevant card can be handed to the presenter as they pass. This procedure is flawed. It does not automatically deprecate out a card when that card is used.
There are several ways to correct this procedure. Easiest method is to simply provide the cards to the presenters at a single controlled point, and to collect the spent cards from the presenters at another controlled point. To do this then all presenters either need to enter the stage from the same side, or else the cards need to be given to the presenters at a common place that all presenters must pass through prior to getting backstage to pick which side they enter from. If the Academy wants to prevent anyone from opening the cards between this common handout point and the stage, then they need to provide security or escort from that point to the wings of the stage. If the presenters are able to leave by either side, the escorts take the card and deposit it into a locked box similarly to how ballots are collected, where the card is slid into the box and can't be retrieved without cutting the zip-tie. This prevents casual accidental return of the used card back to the source. It would be simple enough to use this egress method at both sides of the stage, such that it doesn't really matter how they leave, the cards are collected and securely taken out of circulation.
Typography wouldn't really matter if this was done properly.
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And if I were Waren Beatty, I would have read the outside of the envelope before opening it. Out loud.
But this is 2017, why are we using envelopes?
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If I understand correctly, there are two sets of identical cards, so that whichever side the stage is entered-from, the relevant card can be handed to the presenter as they pass. This procedure is flawed. It does not automatically deprecate out a card when that card is used.
Not so quick. The duplicate cards are also part of their error correction in case something goes wrong with the cards. The reason why the woman also got fired is she was on the other side of the stage, knowing who the real winner was, also with a correct card. Her job was to notice the error, go to the stage, tell them the mistake, and give them the correct card (as the mistake could have been the wrong card in the correct envelope) before something really bad happens like the not-winners get on stage and g
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There are several ways to correct this procedure.
Thank you for correcting this procedure. Maybe next year we could spoil a yet unannounced winner instead of a past one and it will be much better.
Typography wouldn't really matter if this was done properly.
You've fallen into a typical trap that you think you have a procedure so perfect that an extra layer of defence against a fault is not needed. Procedures are among the least effective forms of control over any situation. By replacing one procedure with another you've just shuffled the failure points around.
As it was there was great uncertainty on stage when the wr
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That's retarded. If they know in advance who the presenters are, they know in advance which side they'll be coming from.
What's the point in that? If the presenter sticks it in his pocket to keep for a souvenir it's not in the inbox, so it's not a proble
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Why do the oscars matter? -- Especially on /. (Score:3)
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They don't. Fortunately the summary and article isn't about the Oscars, but rather about typography. Read it, you may learn something.
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My question: What was on the outside of the card? (Score:2)
Typography and graphics design a lost art? (Score:2)
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coasting and getting paid, and getting soft (Score:3)
The travesty is that a company that is presumably being paid MILLIONS of $ to do this job, was skating by with non-thinking process and doing deliberate testing and rethinking of the card design. They got lazy and assumed that every year, nothing goes wrong, so we don't need to be checking or improving what we do. (with regard to the actual big night's event, not saying there's not other work that goes into it)
If something is that important, imagine what you should do to make it as bulletproof as possible - like you're designing cards that hold the nuclear launch codes upon which millions of lives depend. You would create a design and testing process that:
- tested what would happen if some element of the card delivery / reading chain failed or was accidentally broken
- tested different card typography and layout designs
- tested the kinds of people who would be involved in delivering and reading the cards (e.g. blind people, old people, nearsighted people, drunk people, anyone who you'd likely encounter on the night)
- etc, etc, etc.
They got by for years without being rigorous about this part of their job, and this time it bit them in the ass. Don't get complacent.
Fire that dimwit instead (Score:2)
Instead of trying to blame the whole fiasco on the PWC goons (who did fuck up, no doubt here), fire that idiot that designed those cards instead. This is simply beyond dumb.
But lemme guess. "Oh, who's gonna see the cards anyway, no need to hire a professional. My secretary can do that on our trip to the ceremony."
visual + social = competence + profit (Score:2)
I though about this for three minutes, when I discovered all the shit dripping off the fan the morning after.
A simple photograph (or gallery) of person (or people) expected to mount the stage would be the best sanity check. Our visual systems are way better equipped to get a slice of primary this-can't-be-right cognition for a celebrity in the hot light feeling watched by a hundred million people.
Yes, you could still end up with the same visual on two different cards, say an actor or actress nominated in t
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Here's another one.
If you're already reconceiving the card as an eBay click-bait eternal keepsake, you could go so far as to turn the card into a stiff menu-like pop-up book, where an Oscar (in actual gold leaf) pops up when the card is opened (plus sundry visual security clues as per my parent post).
Cards would be made for all nominees (to maintain information symmetry during the process).
For the losers, the gold-leaf Oscar pop-up is replaced by a sultry Michigan J. Frog [akamaihd.net] (who actually sings, if we want to
In related news ... (Score:2)
... Cowboy Neal wins every Oscars category.
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Ahhh Slashdot. The one place where we can endlessly complain about human interfaces and yet when we discuss them we question about who cares.
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Really? You can't think of any situations [squarespace.com] where clear, concise communications are important?
Why Anything Matters (Score:5, Insightful)
There's some famous quote about CS having two hard problems: naming things, and cache-invalidation functions. This is an example of getting a cache-invalidation function wrong.
By formatting the card foolishly, the announcers used a bad cache value (they read quickly, saw a movie title and concluded that the movie title was the desired value) instead of doing the more expensive thing (saying "Oops, cache miss. We have the best actress card here but we need the best picture one"). Font and layout geeks are telling us that the cache could have been correctly invalidated, by using the things that (within their art) are obvious common sense. "This is easy to do right!" they are screaming.
Are you sure that you are not actually seeing this very problem in everything you ever work on? Might not a sufficiently-stoned person realize that this is the essense of every logic gate in the infinitely-dimensional fractal tree of reality? (And might he also say, that by being clear about what level of abstraction you're working at, you may also see how to correctly name things?)
People geek out on things. Yes, those people geek out on Oscars, which is silly. Silly to you, [here I use my Great! Acting! Talent! to make a sneer appear on my face before I dramatically recite the next word in my speech] nerd!
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You forgot off-by-one errors.
There are two hard problems: naming things, cache-invalidation, and off-by-one errors.
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Problem solved, we're no longer letting Serifs into this country.
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I used to think typography didn't matter (Score:2)
I used to think typography didn't matter. Then I saw this:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini... [pinimg.com]
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I worked in Sitt Ifrikeh for a while and the office had a "FLICK IT" bin.
It was considered bad form to not say "Fuck it" when you threw anything in it.
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I loathe blog posts like this.
Good. Please state your name so that I make sure to never employ someone who's not interested in identifying causes and mitigating consequences, learning from mistakes, or who just claims that hindsight is something that isn't worth investigating.
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