Funny looking Mosquito

[malpaso]

This ad appears on the back of the latest Airfix Model World.

I guess the Luftwaffe would have spotted the lower “Mosquito “ as it set off from East Anglia, but even a 262 would have struggled to catch up!

🤣

[Mick4350]

More proof that magazine editors do not know how to proofread. Unusual for this fine publication.

[spruecutter96]

Oh dear.... I can only assume this was designed by someone who wouldn't know a Mossie from a tin of baked-beans. With Covid measures prevalent at a great many companies, I'm guessing that "less-experienced" staff are being utilised in new ways. This kind of gaff will often result.

 

Chris.   

[Mike]

It's the old copy & paste connundrum.  You either re-use the formatting from a previous document and risk making a cock-up, or hope you'll not forget to change it all.  We get a covering letter with some of the books we get, and you'd be surprised how often an issue like this arises.  I've learned to check the page count myself rather than rely on them

[malpaso]

1 hour ago, Mick4350 said:

More proof that magazine editors do not know how to proofread. Unusual for this fine publication.

I assume the problem would be at Airfix or their advertising agency.  I don’t think mags do anything other than positioning of ads.

[fishplanebeer]

Oh dear, it seems it wasn't just the Mosquito kit itself that was prone to error on their part, so perhaps Airfix need to employ a good proof reader as well as someone to proof their Lidar scans?

 

That said in their defence I was once responsible for producing a customer news letter for my employer which included a calendar showing 31 days in February, so not my finest hour!

 

Regards

Colin.

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

I haven't used the reply feature as I don't want anyone thinking I'm picking on them, but there's a common theme of presumption above that magazine staff simply can't know what they're doing.

 

Actually it's far easier to do than evidently most assume it is, and indeed I've made numerous similar errors in my own graphics work. Either I don't know what I've just drawn having been researching it for a good while prior to, or the hypothesis is way off the mark. Of course, the answer is that the hypothesis is way off. It's universally accepted by everyone who's studied it that spotting other peoples' mistakes is much easier than spotting our own. There is literature all over the internet dealing with it. For anything which actually matters (and besides giving some bored people something to opine about, a magazine doesn't really matter) this is factored in to work processes but it costs accordingly. Even our energy industry department head discipline Engineers have their documents yellow-line checked by an independent fully qualified and experienced Engineer. It costs a lot of time and money to have every element of a design checked by someone other than the person who wrote or drew it. It's so important in my industry that critical design documents are independently verified again by qualified engineers from a different organisation on a different pay roll prior to any system ever being energised.

 

When safety critical stuff is worked on on civilian aircraft, a licensed engineer supervises the work but upon completion the work is duplicate inspected by another licensed engineer who had nothing to do with the job, whilst certain safety critical items must be triplicate inspected by two other licensed engineers. That's one of many factors as to why aircraft maintenance is eyewateringly expensive - but it has to be done.

 

Is this all because highly qualified and experienced people genuinely don't understand what they're looking at? Of course not - that's absurd. It's simply the case that cognitive bias is a very real human factor and mistakes like this are spectacularly easy to make on a preformatted template document, and remarkably difficult to spot when it's you doing the layout. Limited resources and time pressures to get things finished by a deadline only exacerbate the issue.

 

Examples closer to the really-doesn't-matter world of little plastic toy aeroplanes can be found whenever someone lays a US insignia backwards or upside down with the star pointing the wrong way. Do we all sneer and say "Nerr, clearly you have no idea what an American aircraft looks like"? I'll let you answer that for yourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited to add - this is as simple as dragging and dropping two aircraft images and replacing the existing ones there on the template, which you use because positioning/spacing/alignment is very important too and consistency in the font used, its colour and its size and weight are also important and too slow to set up from scratch every time. You'll update the first caption then someone calls and says "Have you got a minute?". Gone. But it looks right because you remember getting the right template and you remember dragging the picture around and you even remember thinking about what to change the caption to and that last part is the clincher. Once you've thought about it, it's very easy to mentally tick that off once disturbed and you return and thereafter the silliest error can look correct because you'll see the caption and immediately think "Yes I've dealt with that". Some psychologists specialising in safety events believe most people can mentally juggle 7 pieces of information +/-2. If someone then gives you something else to remember one of your original 7 drops off. You've little say in what gets forgotten. It's reckoned that's why bar staff can step backwards and fall down the hatch into the beer cellar despite having worked there for ages and know the hatch is there and even know they were just told it was open only moments before - or how an experienced carpenter can remove their thumb one day with a table saw.