layout matters so very, very much

Steve Harvey misread the final card for the Miss Universe pageant and Miss Colombia had to relinquish her crown to Miss Phillipines... a humiliation for all concerned, but especially for whoever put this piece of crap card together:

Humans make assumptions when they take in information visually: they subconsciously expect things to fall in patterns and rhythms, and making text big and bold doesn't always emphasize: in fact the opposite - it can cause things to be mentally labeled as unimportant background context.

(My friend Josh brought my attention to something I had missed: ELMININATION ?? Man, what a lousy job all around.)

Of course, one of the most infamous examples is the Florida 2000 Election "Butterfly Ballot":

People made assumptions about alignment and spacing and correlation, and so we got Elderly Jewish Reitirees for Buchanan, aka "Pitchfork Pat" - an absolute statistical and demographic anomaly. Because of this terrible layout Florida's electoral votes went to Bush and the popular vote was over-ridden. It is not too much of a stretch to say that the Middle East would look very, very, very different today if someone if someone had been better at their job.