Unlicensed confusion, by design?

Context is King, a picture’s worth a 1000 words & Jazdy Prawo is a Polish master of disguise driving around Ireland. This is a tale of ambiguous requirements, poor design and PICNIC (explanation soon) . In 2007, the Irish Police wrote a confidential internal memo to clear up some confusion- Police trying to get details of traffic offenders with Polish drivers licenses often found they had stopped Jazdy Prawo, and details of more than 50 of them had been recorded with different addresses and even sexes! The memo explained that Jazdy Prawo actually meant Driver’s License in Polish! This was reported recently in the Irish Times . Other media picked up the story and added a clarifying picture of a pink Polish driver’s license to add context. These included the Telegraph , Metro (with a UK Licence!), Politico , and Bloglingua which even had annotations on the picture!

Napoleon Bonaparte said ‘History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.’ but the blue license saga sounds suspiciously beyond stupidity. Apart from having vastly different interpretations of privacy laws, there seems to be a problem with this problem. Let’s look at the license in terms of design. There is a central information area of field labels and field text, in 2 different fonts. Around this is a general heading area in another font and color, where we find Jazdy Prawo written at the top right. How could more than 50 trained Police Officers misread that as someone’s name?

Some media did more research. They discovered another older peach Polish license . On this license, the poor design results in Jazdy Prawo appearing as the first part of the driver information. It is displayed in the heading area but in field text style positioned under a field label, and it runs into the central information area of the license. You can understand how this license could be misread. Despite strong independent claims to the contrary, there is no problem with the blue license. So Jazdy Prawo is not a Polish master of disguise, the correct picture is worth 1000 words and context is always king. And the supposedly confusing pink licenses? A media PICNIC – problem in chair not computer!