menus, branding, advertisments, etc.

To start off this next section are these menu cards I found at a local bar/pool (the stick and ball game) place here in Panama City.

The first example I saw was the card on the top, where initially I wasn’t sure what the vertical words on the left were, as I had read them from left to right literally as “FM, OE, ON, DU.” But on second glance I realized that it was a “Food Menu,” but vertical. While legible, the readability isn’t good. While readability could be improved by having it be horizontal, let’s entertain the idea that it can only be vertical.

One solution I’d think would work would have them separate, Food on the left side of the card, Menu on the right side. In some ways, this might make it take longer to read by having both words separated like that and it might introduce another form of disruption in the visual hierarchy, but I think that given they’d stay the same type style and that one word would imply the other in this scenario (Food implies food in the middle of the card, menu implies food in the first place), I think it’d be one way to solve this readability problem.

Another thing I’m not sure why it was made a choice, but aside from the two cards having the same typeface for Food Menu, they use a serif font on the top one and a sans serif font on the bottom one for the rest of the information. I would say the right one is a bit better because it boasts all caps for the food item for emphasis and ingredients in lower case, but since both cards aren’t the same typeface for the food or ingredients, there becomes a lack of unity and consistency for the food menu card.

This is the front of a menu from a local Chinese American restaurant in Panama City, Florida. Food’s good, but this would be an example of bad typography. There’s at least 5 different typefaces that I can count off in this one brochure of a menu. While each typeface present here is relatively legible and contrasted clearly from its bright background, the presence of the 5 different typefaces adds visual clutter and discord to not only the overall design of the menu, but also contaminates the possible message this menu portrays. Chinese Restaurant New York Style? New York Style King House?

To start, the completely vertical text of “Chinese Restaurant,” the main strokes, stems, and spines of each letter is absurdly thick. Due to this, there isn’t any room left to make the other aspects of the letters stand out and make those letters what they are. To illustrate, the stems of the “H” are so thick that the corresponding bar is also absurdly thin. From afar, this “H” would look like two uppercase “i’s,” much like the upper case “i” below it.

Similar sentiments can be said about the R’s and A’s. Other things to note is that key information such as the telephone number and location are in different typefaces. I think instead of having the telephone number as a different thick typeface for emphasis, they could’ve had it as the same typeface as the one above and below it and perhaps had it in a bold font to accomplish the same goal but visually harmonize it better.

The kerning and tracking of the whole menu seems fine for the most part, maybe the kerning is a bit too tight between the “y” and “n” in Tyndall and maybe too loose between the “W” and “a” in Wal-mart, but overall the use of too many typefaces is what makes this a bad case of typography.