Pizza Flyer Design Considered

Posted by Adam Kuban, February 15, 2006 at 4:25 PM

Because we work closely with them in our day jobs, the staff of Slice loves graphic designers, art directors, and the rest of their ilk. But sometimes, guys and gals, you just overanalyze everything. (And could you be any more anal about the way your text rags!?)

Anyway, a design prof turns his attention to pizza-flyer design on design blog Speak Up:

So why are pizza flyers so good, yet so bad? One student repeated a familiar argument: the reason pizza flyers look so bad is because they are put together by people who think that they are designers simply because they have a computer and an illegal copy of Photoshop. The old ‘everyone thinks they’re a designer’ argument. Well I’m not sure I would agree with the generalisation because, while I don’t doubt that a lot of pizza flyers are put together by ‘amateurs’, a lot of them are designed by your actual real-life designers, some of them for a bit of extra cash but a lot of them as part of their stock-in-trade. No – the real reason pizza flyers look the way they do is because that’s what pizza flyers are expected to look like. It’s not the designers that are bad, but the visual language. Comparing a pizza flyer with some agency-originated design is like comparing the language you hear in a court to the stuff you hear on a building site – or college staff room. Pizza flyers are simply visual expletives: short, brutish and to the point.

We'd love to see this prof carry his classroom exercise a bit further and have his students create well-designed pizza flyers. It'd be an interesting comparison.

Pizza Flyers: The Height of Good Graphic Design? [Speak Up]

Post a Comment Favorite this!  (0)

Tags: Pizza Delivery