Far be it from me

There is a lot of bad signage in Regina. A lot. And personally, I hate bad signage but what I hate more is bad billboards. I hate ‘em. Bad billboards are the worst because they escape what signage confines. And bad signage says a great number of things when you see it. Let’s look at it in terms of a restaurant. Bad signage on a restaurant likely tells you instantly that this is a place you don’t want to eat. It tells you that this is a place that likely has no money for advertising. It tells you that this place just does not care one bit about what you think of them and that the people who own that restaurant have no taste. And that’s fine. It’s brutal and I always want to run in and say “I bet you could increase your business by 80% if you took down that horrible sign” but it’s fine. It’s confined. It may never escape their location and I only have to be confronted with it once. But billboards expand that bad taste. They give it life and allow it to run freely across the city unavoidably. When a business with bad taste starts spreading it around, it really irks me. Where bad signage is a mother putting up her child’s horrible drawing on the fridge at home, bad billboards are that mother taking that horrible drawing and sending it to all of her friends and family, photocopying it and posting it in Safeway and on light poles. It’s standing on the top of a building and pointing to your child’s crappy drawing and shouting to the world “isn’t my kid great?” No. Your kid is not great. Your kid is horrid. Your kid should know that the sky is not green. Your kid should give dad two legs. Which leads me to the source of my ire, a billboard by my house for Salon Fli. The billboard in question is just an image of a girl with the logo? in the bottom right and the phone number in the top right. First of all this is not a logo:

And because that is not a logo and because it says absolutely nothing about your business–I have no idea what it is you do. The argument could be made that “hey, you saw it and you looked it up and now you know what we do so obviously the ad works right?” Wrong. I looked it up because I thought “who is hanging up their kids drawing?” There are likely infinite possibilities surrounding the name. It has tons of meanings. It could be a house fly, what a plane does or what hip-hoppers aspired to be in the 1980s. You kind of have a lot of room just to start spitballing. Another awesome addition would have been the word Salon on there. Then I would have had a clue. I’m sorry to rag. Good on you. Way to go local business, I’m glad you’re making it work. Seriously. I respect that to no end. But please, seriously, talk to someone about your advertising because it’s not very effective and I’ll have to look at it everyday for the next two weeks and I already have another series of shitty billboards to look at every f’n day.

Note: This will be down in a day because I feel horrible for raggin’ on ‘em. Like I say, good on you local business. It’s great to see. It just really irked me so, get it out, post it up, drop it off. Thanks.