Walking around town the other day, I came across this sign in the window of a local store:

I also saw a similar sign today that read, “Free Wood For Sale.” Actually, I didn’t see it, my son did while we were driving home. He swiftly noticed the irony in the message and reported it to me (that’s my boy!). Maybe I’m just a little nuts, but stuff like this drives me crazy. Didn’t anyone read these signs and realize how ridiculous they were? Tops on my list of pet peeves are errors and visual offenses in signage and print ads. Misuse of possessive vs. plural is particularly annoying to me. This is one of my strange obsessions I guess, but I always look at signage and ads in search of errors, verbal and visual.

Just as there are rules for grammar, punctuation, syntax, and spelling, there are also rules of graphic design. A graphic can become visually ineffective, confusing, or outright visually offensive, simply by the choice of font style, font size, color, placement, and shapes.

It all comes down to attention to detail. If you can’t spell, then use spell check. If you are grammatically deficient, then have someone edit and proofread for you. If you can’t write, then hire a writer. If you can’t design, then hire a designer. It’s like one of those poor tone-deaf people auditioning for American Idol, truly thinking they can sing, only to put themselves on national television for the ultimate in public humiliation. Before you go ahead and plaster grammatical, syntactical, spelling or graphic errors and offenses on the front of your store, on a billboard, in an ad, on your blog or in any public forum, stop and make sure that the message is clear and the visuals are appealing. Presentation is everything.