Fire your agency

Oh where to even start?

Spotted this gem along a two-lane highway a few miles from a car ferry in a low-populated area that sees mostly summer usage. In other words, not much traffic, except perhaps on a 3 day weekend. So if it's supposed to refer to a passing lane, it's just not a good reference. If that red hump on the guy's back is a bowling ball, where are the holes? And then he says "I'm there." He's at the savings lane? Is that like the 10 items or less lane at the grocer? I can't think of any other good analogies for lanes; help? From a design standpoint, the red ball does nothing except to obscure the red text.

My commute grew even more exciting as I saw its sister billboard about 50 miles away in Port Angeles, right across the street from where the Walmart is or used to be (hard to tell these days).

Now the ball has grown and is definitely about to knock out the bald guy, or, he's doing some yogic balancing act, OR, OR, he has a huge tumor growing out of his head. Maybe some new artist just discovered the spotlight effect feature in Photoshop and had to show it off, poorly, as the highlight is centered, and any Photoshop artist worth their salt knows how to move that baby to other parts of the shape. Again the driving lane analogy is poor, because by this time, the highway has been four lanes for several miles. In any case, I think I'd rather buy from Steve than Ray.

Loose Paint

When they first posted this billboard I was tempted to photograph it as a disaster waiting to happen. Sure enough...
But perhaps it will drive more business to the casino. Folks appreciate honesty.

This was in Costa Rica, outside of Puerto Viejo. Is that a water droplet? What does that have to do with land development? And purple/red? Not much about this works, aside from no obvious grammatical errors.

Did I flunk 7th grade English? Yes you can!

No wonder our country is becoming illiterate. It should read,
"Slot play for only a penny?" "Yes, only a penny!"
or
"Can you play slots for only a penny?" "Yes you can!"

"Any of these for only 99c?" "Yes, they're 99c!"
or
"Can you buy any of these for 99c?" "Yes you can!"

It's one thing to rely upon the implied "you", another to imply entire phrases.

Northwest' Honda's Billboard's

Northwest Honda is always good for an unnecessary apostrophe or two. I first noted their previous board and was disappointed I didn't get a picture of it before they replaced it with this one. It was even more difficult to read, with a very busy background and had lots and lots of plural words ending with 's. I was relieved when I spotted their new one still possessing a grammatical error, even though I'd emailed their marketing department pointing out the failure of their message.

Welcome to Billboard Disasters: Billboards that Fail

We all know about the big disaster this date commemorates, but there has been dwelling in our midst a virulent yet little complained-about phenomena: billboards that butcher the English language. Along the lines of Cake Disasters and "Fail" is a blog that is dedicated to those large signs along the roadside. The ones that went wrong somewhere along the line. Whether there is a blatant typo, grammatical offense, apostrophe abuse or you just can't read it from a moving vehicle, it deserves its special place to expose the foolishness of whoever designed it.