Smart Versus Wise Person Poster

Wise People

“Wise people learn from other people’s mistakes”

During my 16 years as a Realtor® I attended many functions that were motivational in nature. It’s not unusual for anyone in a sales position to do so; in fact; it’s encouraged. One quote I heard many times – and it always made sense to me – was ” Smart people learn from their mistakes, wise people learn from other people’s mistakes. Of course, this is predicated on the idea that we humans do learn by analyzing our mistakes. Sometimes I wonder about this.

There are many variations of this from different motivational speakers. “A smart person learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise person learns from the mistakes of others” is one.

“Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.” is another.

A longer version states, “A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. But a wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid the mistake altogether.”

Yes; you can phrase it many ways – but it all says the same thing. Since my personal recollection was hearing it the way it was stated in the first paragraph, that’s the version I’m going to use in my poster. You can probably find other versions by investigating with your favorite search engine.

Definitions

So now we’ll define our words smart and wise using the dictionary. This is just in case we’re unsure of the difference.
So, a dictionary such as merrium-webster.com would suggest:

SMART: “having or showing a high degree of mental ability: INTELLIGENT, BRIGHT”
WISE: characterized by wisdom: marked by deep understanding, keen discernment, and a capacity for sound judgement”

Color

With the semantics handled it’s time to turn to color. It’s hard to determine for sure what color represents wisdom. Depending on where you research this you might see blue or you might see yellow. No definite consensus. I also saw purple listed. So for my choice, I’m going with purple to be the color of wisdom. In some circles it’s also the color of creativity, royalty, power and spirituality. So, there it is — I need to make the predominate color of the poster purple. Time to start thinking of what symbols to add to the poster.

Symbols

The first symbol of wisdom that comes to mind is the owl. From TV commercials to childrens books the owl has always symbolized wisdom. This goes back to the ancient Greeks.

But the owl isn’t the only bird to represent wisdom and intelligence. Nordic mythology puts the raven in this category. If you’ve even watched a raven drop a walnut from the top of a streetlight to break it open, you already understand how resourceful these birds are.

Not a bird but still considered highly intelligent is the dolphin. They have their own language; can understand certain human words; and are very good at solving problems. At least; that’s how they’re portrayed in the movies.

In Eastern spirituality cultures and Buddhism the lotus flower represents wisdom. And in some cultures a stalk of wheat is viewed as a symbol of knowledge.

Ask an educator and you’ll be told that books characterize knowledge and learning going way back. And since the light bulb came along it has been used to portray inspiration and knowledge in illustrations and conversation.
Have you never heard someone say, “A light bulb lit and I got this great idea” or something of the sort?

Finally, and we could add more to the list, the key is an object that illustrates knowledge and success in many countries and cultures. Heroes and famous people in sports. movies, and other walks of life have been given the key to the city during well publicized presentations for their achievements.

If you want to read about a lot of symbols of intelligence and wisdom the author at:
www.outofstress.com/wisdom-symbols has done a very good job of explaining these. Check it out.

The Poster

I’ve used several different platforms to design posters; currently I’m using an application called Kittl. It runs on only Windows computers at this time. It has many copyright free graphics and fonts to use. Rather than use one of their great templates, I usually start with a blank canvas. The largest size I usually go for is 20″ X 30″
to keep pixelation and blurriness to a minimum. However, setting the download to 200-300 dpi would probably allow bigger posters and I may offer larger in the future.

Let’s add the symbols of wisdom on the blank canvas and organize them. I try to center on the canvas as I will crop the top and bottom for smaller poster sizes. I may use minor less important decorations on the top and bottom that will be cropped out on these sizes.

Here’s how it looks initially:

Once the objects are on the canvas I gave them a little border shading.

Since the color purple represents wisdom, it should be used somewhere. So, I added a Kittl predesigned background. They have quite a few to choose from. Technically, the hex number of the color of the purple portion of the background suggests the hue is called Purple Mountain Majesty. Here’s how it looks now:

The Quote

I’ve chosen 2 fonts to use: Anton san serif with a size of 150 and Albura with serif, also with a size of 150. This seems large, however, keep in mind it’s for a poster and not letter size paper. Then I gave the writing a few curves and shadows — easy to do with Kittl. And here’s the final poster which can be ordered from Desert Square. Click the picture and see the listing.

Thanks for reading. Please check out my current featured posters on the home page. If you see something else at my store that you want to know about or have any questions, leave me a comment… Ed