Swallow your pride and stop blaming your tools

I was at my favorite neighborhood biergarten last week when I spied a flyer on the bar for the today’s Cinco de Mayo event. Upon closer examination, I noticed that the kerning was set very high in between the Ma and the Yo so it looked like Cinco de Ma Yo. I pointed it out to my favorite bartender who then pointed it out to the person that put the flyer together. That’s when it started to get interesting.

Upon being presented with this graphical oversight, which I felt was completely avoidable with minimal effort, she advised me that Photoshop wouldn’t let her change the kerning. Sorry folks, but when you blame Photoshop for something as minute as kerning adjustment, I’m going to have to call bullshit. Without missing a beat, I literally called bullshit on the situation and let her know that not only would Photoshop allow you to adjust the kerning, but it wouldn’t have taken much effort to use two text fields one for “Cinco de Ma” and another for “Yo” if she couldn’t have figured it out.

Her response to being called out? She changed her story and claimed that she wasn’t going to “waste that much time on it”. Both solutions would have only taken seconds to implement, this person was just being lazy. Sadly, the time it took her to justify the mediocre product she produced she could have fixed it 10 times over. Sadder still is that the individual is also the social media guru-maven-wizard-something-or-other at the place, you know the type 😉

I didn’t want mince words further, but before the end of the night someone else was at the bar pointing out the same problems to their wife. He was a designer and had even less tolerance than I did for the kerning and went on to point out another handful of visual errors on the flyer. Keep in mind, it was a quarter page flyer, being so small every issue is magnified 100 fold.

Unfortunately the person I’m talking about doesn’t have anyone in the organization telling them they are doing a bad job or inspiring them to be the best they can be. Employees left to their own devices with absolutely no checks and/or balances tend to hurt a company / brand more than they help. Don’t get me started on how one sided their Facebook interactions are!

Moral of the story? Swallow your fuckin’ pride and admit when you suck. Once you come to grips with the fact that you aren’t the world’s perfect person, take the time to better yourself and your output. I leave you with a quote, from the always inspiring Jake the Dog:

Sucking at something is the first step to becoming sorta good at something.

¡Feliz Día de la Batalla de Puebla!

Josh Sherman - The Man, The Myth, The Avatar

About Josh

Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.


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