As a designer, I am constantly switched on. Even on my honeymoon holiday, my critical eye for aesthetics is permanently set to "engaged".
For example, this morning while at the breakfast buffet I had an encounter with some poor quality design that led to disastrous consequences.
The way breakfast works here is to walk around all the counters of unlabelled food and help yourself to anything you recognise. Sausages, easy. Fried egg, spot on. Bacon... Ok the bacon had been passed through a shredder for some reason but I could still tell it was tasty meaty goodness.
Among the countless unmarked platters was a red plastic bottle covered in illustrations of tomatoes. 'Brilliant', I thought. What better way to compliment the full English I'd just put together than lashings of Tommy K? I proceeded to twirl the bottle in wild arcs all over the meal, coating my breakfast in spicy tomato flavourings.
It was only when I got back to my seat and began eating the spicy tomato flavourings that I realised I hadn't coated my meal in spicy tomato flavourings.
I'd covered it in strawberry sauce.
Strawberry sauce!? Why had this happened? What business did strawberry sauce have being beside the bacon counter? OK, sure, there were pancakes on the other side, but why draw tomatoes on the bottle when what lies within it is strawberry sauce?
Furious, I stormed back to the offending counter and raised the bottle up high for all to see. I inspected the tomato graphics long and hard, and they were indeed still tomatoes, albeit looking slightly like demented strawberries. Possibly actual strawberries. OK, they were definitely strawberries, but no measures had been made to make them NOT look like tomatoes.
Thanks to the oversights of one careless designer, my breakfast - the most important meal of the day - was ruined.
I ate it anyway.
For Day 266 of my THREEHUNDREDANDSIXTEEFIVE challenge, I am wearing the next T-shirt in my birthday collection featuring a much clearer and easier to interpret design, gifted to me by my family. It shows a macaw floundering around the rather ominous text "Run for your life", which means...
OK, nope, I'm not sure what this visual means either. But at least I didn't have to eat it to find out this time.
