While in a previous post I was pointing toward an anonymous drive-by hit-and-run, my friend Bogdan takes a step further and authoritatively exhumes the prominent victims of a high-profile genocide—nicely embalmed corpses we're happy to carry around each and every one of us, everyday, as a zombified bunch of ignorant undertakers.

As Bogdan puts it:


Now for the forensics enthusiasts, here it is, the body (looking alive to the untrained eye):



Enlarged, the inconspicuous plague that caused the death becomes hideously obvious (not for the fain of heart), the infamous A-caron:



What a massacre—right on the money!

For the foreign readers: the correct spelling is BANCA NAȚIONALĂ A ROMÂNIEI (The National Bank of Romania), where the "Ă" (A-breve) in NAȚIONALĂ was sloppily replaced with an "Ǎ" (A-caron), a letter that doesn't exist in Romanian language. It may seem like a small thing, but it's not. Misusing the language on official items is a bad thing and quite a shame. A banknote is an important national symbol and ignorantly designing it reflects a general lack of respect for the country, a bit like wiping your ass with the flag.

So much for the "money talks" proverb—it talks gibberish sometimes, it seems. And in the meanwhile "money is the root of all evil" proves right once again. Thank you, Bogdan, for your sharp eye.

Now for real, joke aside: let's make a wall of shame, a place somewhere all this bad design can be exposed, e.g. as an on-line gallery of horrors. There are plenty of them, in those free glossy magazines, on posters and I've even seen some horrendous A-tilde (Ã) supers on TV (ProTV seems to excel in this regard, it seems). It would be a public service announcement that many (especially young) designers could benefit from. I'm seriously thinking about hosting or at least mirroring it. Have picts, hints, proposals, ideas?—please send 'em