Found this one on Flickr. Made by Bjarne P Tveskov from Denmark. As he explains: “Probably the most loved error message in the world”.
The original illustration was made by Yiying Lu. It became famous when Twitter started using it to show the service was having problems handling traffic. More info about the most famous digital whale.
Imagine for a moment that your own service or company would be so popular that users started composing songs about it and making these kind of artworks, of your error messages?
This could be the ultimate in camouflage for geeks – an ‘erased torso’ t-shirt – available to buy.
Personally, I just can’t see why it’s so appealing. (That was a gag, but you might have missed it.) Can’t see. Missed it. Geddit? I’ve seen enough invisible gags, thanks. – Ed.
Have you ever experienced this situation: you ask a serious question in an online forum and all you get is answers like:
“Look it up on Google”
“See other threads”
“I have had that same question and never found an answer!”
“That is a stupid question!”
Stuff like that can really ruin your day.
The picture on the right here is a screenshot from a forum where this particular situation plays out in a hilarious way. I couldn’t help but feel really sorry for the person making the first request.
But the creative answers were just too damned funny. Enjoy!
We, the geeks, know about Photoshop. We realize there’s an army of marketing folks brushing up the supermodels of the world. Sure, a few million people have seen the infamous Dove ad, but that probably doesn’t stick for too long.
Every girl with a low self-esteem caused by the Photoshop filters, masks, and stamps should follow blogs like Photoshop Disasters on a daily basis. Oops, somebody did lose 2 inches of their waist line, but where’s her second leg? That kind of stuff.
Berliner girls will probably get aware of this soon, since a rather professional ad buster has made some incredibly good stickers depicting the Photoshop interface. Like Gizmodo says, this is “pitch-perfect adbusting right here”.
Did you stare at it for a while? See what it is? Yes, a hyper-realistic version of Adobe Photoshop CS4. It was made for an online software seller by an ad agency. You can see the whole process of rebuilding the Photoshop interface in a set on Flickr.
Pixlr.com is a Flash based Online Image Editor you can use for free. It loads faster than Photoshop, it’s a lot(!) cheaper and does a lot less. I know, for some of you that is bad news but for 90% of people that is good news. As you can see I imported a self-portrait straight from Flickr (just copy/paste the URL) and made it lighter, enlarged my nose and made my mouth smaller, and it took me only 2 minutes to do all that.
The application supports layers, filters and most basic editting tools and when you are ready you can save the image to your desktop as a JPG or PNG.
Since Boris is on a well-deserved vacation, I’m taking care of his edgy and funny weekly series Mischievous Monday Mornings. I’m not sure where Boris finds his inspiration, but for me a traditional newspaper did it. The web editor of nrc.next, Esther Holtkamp, pointed me to the Photoshop Disasters blog, a place where “Eddie con Carne” keeps track of hilarious or freaky Photoshop blunders. Turns out that most Photoshop artists should take a class in anatomy. Eddie proves this with screenshots and great comments. Like “Givenchy Polio Chic“, this model lost a leg to a somewhat too zealous Photoshop guy:
Written on 30th March 2009
3 COMMENTS 
Written on 26th March 2009
Written on 16th January 2009
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
