Annals of bad design (1)

(Another reason to hate The Opposite House...)

The drinks menu in Mesh - a would-be swanky cocktail bar that's part of the huge and soulless Opposite House hotel complex I visited for the first time the other day - inflicts a subtle but excruciating torture on the eyes. The font is tiny, and thin. And it's a pale red or orange colour..... on a creamy orange background: so, no contrast at all, almost invisible!!

To add insult to injury, the lighting level is so low that you'd struggle to read even a clearly printed menu. Their gimmick is that the wait staff will offer to illuminate the pages for you with their pocket torches. Groan! Even with the torches, this font and colour scheme is virtually illegible. And it's a fairly extensive menu, with a lot of elaborate cocktail recipes. I'd like to be able to read it at leisure, in privacy, without having the staff hovering over me every second until I make my choice. This is just a horrible, horrible, horrible idea.

I was tempted to ask for the Braille version of the menu.

Now, in general, I am in favour of a low level of lighting in bars; it cultivates a sense of intimacy; also, sometimes perhaps, a sense of melancholy - but that's also a key part of the bar experience at times. Yes, low lighting is good; but not so low that you can't read the bloody drinks list! There need to be at least a few oases of reasonably substantial lighting (usually at the bar itself) to enable you to do things like that without too much difficulty.

This inept piece of graphic design would seem to be some kind of concerted 'branding' concept for the whole complex, because I found the (slightly better lit) restaurant next door had a similar if not identical colour scheme on its menus.

Bad design really gets my goat.

I imagine that, in fact, this instance is not simple incompetence: the people who chose this design realised the colour combination didn't work, but deliberately forged ahead with it anyway, thinking it was somehow 'clever'. This, then, isn't simply bad design, but perverse design. That annoys me even more....