Blog Post 1: Inappropriate Font Usage

"Dessert"

Suggested typeface: Chop Chop PB

Original version

I've always found "Chinese" restaurants in Western countries very interesting (mainly hilarious), not just because of their variations on delicious, supposedly "Chinese" food, but also the appearance of their menus. The other day, I decided to visit The China Buffet King on Sauchiehall Street and, what do you know, the menu is written with Comic Sans. This is quite normal, as my aunt is a restauranter and she uses Comic Sans. To make it look more "friendly", I guess, as Asian food is, to this day, still quite "foreign" to the westerners. Dear god, if a dish of chicken has lotus or black beans, people immediately turn to ordering a steak with aside of chips. So, I do understand the so-called "need" to use the same old, friendly, Comic Sans to avoid scaring the westerners away. I was so fascinated with this phenomenon, that I started looking for more examples of Chinese restaurant menus. Didn't find any other magnificent examples, apart from comic sans, but I did find some menus with weird title fonts. I couldn't figure out what font was used in the chosen picture...I wonder if it was handwritten. All three titles look so inconsistent. For instance, the letter 'S' looks different in every title. Also the tracking seems to change from one extreme to the other. In other words, the menu looks cheap with its inconsistent titles (especially when rest of the text is written with helvetica) reflecting bad taste. Also the titles don't exactly say "Asian" to me, which is probably essential for a Chinese restaurant as it is Asian.
As a suggestion, I would use the Chop Chop font for this menu as it reflects the Oriental World as it is shown on the example saying: "CHINESE CULTURE". To me, it looks like the type is entirely formed by a bunch of chopsticks, and that is what Chinese food culture and, therefore, Chinese restauraunts are all about.