According to Jonathan Baldwin, they are well designed because they communcate the information intended and set up the viewer's expectations.
Go read it, it'll make your head hurt to begin with.
If I've read it correctly, what Jonathan is saying is that it's not the design that is bad, it's the style that is expected of a pizza flyer that is hopelessly disgusting. It just goes to show that it isn't always the case of designing a visually attractive piece of design, because that doesn't directly correlate with good design. Sometimes the most awful design - as is depicted perfectly with the pizza flyer - is the best design for the job. As Jonathan outlines, it gets the message across, it's easy to use, and it signifies what a pizza takeaway is all about.
Separating good design and visually appealing (and unappealing) is like separating a car from it's wheels when you first think about it, but it would seem that creating a good design isn't always about flattering your ego.
What do you lot think?
It's like Art v Design all over again.
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3 comments:
I think that expectation has a lot to do with it. If you get a flyer from an independent shop, you don’t expect it to be well designed, and therefore you don’t recoil when you see it. If you look at these types of flyers next to some produced by a multinational business (eg. Domino’s pizzas) you will see a difference in quality. However, as the product costs substantially more, you would expect this.
I believe any leaflet that has a lot of content on it could be argued to be ‘well designed’ as communicating what the product is can be half the battle. I think the writer of this article has forgotten that content is king. If one shop made a really classy flyer, the clientèle attracted would be different. Often adding value to a product can be done with simple, high quality and well designed advertisements such as this.
Thanks, I'm interested to see what I come up with too, most likely a big mess!
I had a read of that Pizza menu article and it was a really interesting read, about how it says although it looks terrible but it performs its function well. I loved the analogy of the witch hunt in 'The Holy Grail' too.
This is one of those design topics where you have to think of the client. I can safely say that the majority of people who open pizza takeaways and so on usually are not on the bleeding edge of design knowledge.
Also, the industry as you say has set the bar and it will be a hard thing to shake off. You can normally tell the difference though in the area I live. Pizza menus look very different to Chinese takeaway menus. The latter tend to be more simple and less 'bling'.
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