So uber, it hurts
“Salmons!” the colonel barked.
“Yes, sir.”
“You remember those f*ckin’ posters we had back in the f*ckin’ rear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want those but with newer f*ckin’ pictures.”
“Yes, sir.”
And I was off, mission in hand. If memory serves…
Ah yes, those posters. Ugly, big prints of bad photos on posterboard. Print shops on Fort Hood could blow up anything to nearly any size – fuzzy and jpeg’d as all get out, but frikkin’ huge if that’s what you wanted. Twenty or so 3×5 foot boards hung in our halls back in the states.
I would do better.
I dove into the work. Photoshop, Illustrator, online maps, my mind kicked into gear, thoughts, ideas, concepts trickling and pouring in like rain through an Iraqi roof. Finally, here was something that required my kung-fu.
I took the boring unit emblem…
And shizzelized it with some sweet stripes. Shaded depth action, with uber dashes!
Each poster would have a map, showing where that particular poster was taken. But not just any map…
But some high-speed, GPS-tracking, target-acquired mappage. Booya. There we is!
After several hours of tweaking and fiddling, I had finally put together what I thought was a rockin’ looking poster. I built the templates in Photoshop so I could easily switch out the photos and information. Our poster factory was complete.
Behold the uber svelteness. So fresh and so clean, clean.
Just as I finished the prototype and readied it to show the commander…
“You got those pictures Salmons?” one of the crony assistant staff captains asked.
“Yes sir, just let me export the tiff so we can get the resolution to make it look good.”
“Oh…we are just going to print them out from PowerPoint on the laserjet. What’s ‘tiff’?”
*Sigh* So it’s back to the old ways. No frills, no flourishes, just 8×10 inch pieces of paper with bled ink and blurry registry.
And they wouldn’t even let me pick the pictures. They just wanted them all – the underexposed, duplicated, out of focus shots. Naturally they had no eye for what made a good picture.
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Talking Salmons 
That poster looked sweet. Sorry about the PPT stuff…
I hate when people pull that after you’ve worked so hard at making something look great.
Ya, another in a long string of kicks in the pants.
I’ll keep all this stuff I’m doing so that when the Army stops it’s “keep ’em in” program, I’ll have more to show businesses than lists of meetings I attended.
just a thought: Why WOULD they go with leftover tuna surprise when instead they could have Steak AND Lobster? Excellence usually sells itself, but sometimes you might have to nudge the thrice-blessed recipients of such magnificence into recognizing the benefits (to themselves). Could be it’s an IT thing; I say that because I know nothing (nada, zilch) in that field, and YOU obviously do, so perhaps it intimidates them. If it does, YOU’ve got the power to de-mystify enough of it for them to appreciate, yet I’m sure plenty (uber? ;-)) left in reserve for future dazzlement. If not – their loss. Just a thought….. And it IS a great-looking poster.
There’s a class they teach at the Captains Career Course where they teach permanent and undying love for the horror that is PowerPoint. If information can be transferred from one person to another, it can be done better in PowerPoint.
That’s my theory now, anyway.
Yup, so true. PowerPoint is the cureall for information, like Windex is for medical problems.