Not a mistake, it was an intentionally made typo. This story-call it a tragedy or anything else-happened in our school 1 week ago and the lessons I learned from my misgivings.
If you are a careful reader, you might find hilarious error in the poster in the photo. I never thought that we are able to make such a significant error and never discover what's wrong with it. We attached this poster in our school's cafeteria to celebrate our school's 5th anniversary (my club PowerPoint User Group design a cafeteria poster monthly). I always emphasized to other fellow students never to use too many texts on single slide whenever they make PowerPoint slides, so we applied that philosophy in our poster. No other texts: no details about our school, no yearbooks, no flatters, but only one sentence... "Happy Birthday Cheongshim" (which supposed to be).
We spent 2 hours to design this poster, and after sending photoshop file to print shop, we were so proud of ourselves. I clearly remember how excited we were... really, it was brilliant! The harmony of cyanic colors and graffiti arrows was dynamic, the sunburst gradient at the back of the poster added energy to the poster, and most of all, all the bursting images contributed in formation of depth within the whole texture. We just splattered all the brushes we had for 2 hours, erasing ditches and adjusting colors. Kind of messy works to do, but anyways we loved designing, and we didn't care a lot about those time-consuming processes.
1 week later, the whole printing was finished, and next day, we got the printed poster from the print shop. We were all smiling, watching at the complete artwork, which would be remembered as a masterpiece in our club's history. We carried the package to the cafeteria, and cut out the yellow tape on it, and unrolled it. Till then, we didn't recognized the catastrophic mistake we made, so we were still smiling like pigs in the mud pool. Suddenly, while I was taking photo of my cheerful comrades holding our remarkable poster, I realized an idiosyncrasy of that blue poster. After that, it's no worth dictating it word by word. Still our 'glorious' poster is attached on the wall, and I'm planning to rip it off from the wall at the end of this week.
So, what did I learn from this shameful mistake?
First, bad reputation is more likely to be publicized than good one. No one ever noticed our cafeteria poster before, some did-more than 50-but not so much compared to this time. Many people asked me what's wrong with our design team, and I saw some people taking photo of this poster (fortunately, they didn't post it in Facebook). I don't want to blame them for being cruel. It's our mistake, and we should be responsible for that. Well, the fact is, I now recognize why mass media always talks about misgivings of celebrities and politicians. Those 'invaluable' information about their private lives, and those foolish things done either consciously and unconsciously by others, are better sources for gossip. Well, the hypothesis lacks concrete proofs, so I'll just say this is an educational guess derived from my experience. Okay, I now learned one idea for decent presentation. Tell the audiences shameful memories of yours, and more audiences will be interested in your story.
Second, the context is the most crucial factor I have to notice beforehand anything else. While designing PowerPoint slides, or posters, I and my team always focused on design, not the context. We copied some contents in the Wikipedia, and some from Korean encyclopedia, but never created them. Furthermore, we never 'double-checked' the texts within the poster, because we thought that no one would read it carefully-the major reason brought this pandemonium. One can recognize how obsessed we were in design , not in the context, if one notices the size of font (about 140, perhaps). No one can be that stupid to let such thing happen! Nevertheless, I now recognize why so many renowned presenters and slide designers emphasize the importance of the context. What matters is the contents you speak, not the animation (in presentation) or photoshop-made shapes and templates. Well, people notice "Happy Brithday" more than blue arrows we used, and they talk more about "Happy Brithday", so I think this is quite a reasonable conclusion.
I got good lesson from this mistake, and for presenter like me, this experience is really valuable-I now got one more embarrassing story to tell to audiences! Hurrah! I believe this experience will expand my perspectives on presentation. So, to summarize...
1. Embarrassing moments of your life are great sources to use in your presentation
2. The context is what matters, not the design or templates.
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