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Deconstructing a Cooking-Show Logo

Normally I don’t watch cooking shows, although I did grow up watching Julia Child. She was on TV right before dinner, so I was ready to eat when I smelled my mother’s food. That said, I recently saw a TV ad for Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. I was impressed with his logo. I thought you might like to know why.

The Kitchen Nightmares typescript is set with the first word over the second, centered and in all caps. There is almost no leading between the two lines of type. The word KITCHEN is about fifty percent larger than NIGHTMARES, which works fine since the latter is ten letters and the former is seven. The designer has set the two words in a heavy, Gothic, sans-serif typeface. So the overall feel of the logo is one of solidity, like a fortress.

By itself, this type treatment would be readable at any size, but it would be commonplace. So the designer has altered the type in two intriguing ways.

The word NIGHTMARES has what looks like a bolt of lightning streaming through the block letters of the word in a jagged path. The effect is jarring, electric (so to speak). The tone is one of quick and restless movement.

In accord with this nightmarish mood, the designer has replaced the "I" in KITCHEN with a kitchen knife, point downward and jammed into the letter "G" in NIGHTMARES. The handle of the knife sticks out above the equally tall letters in the all-caps word KITCHEN, drawing the reader’s attention to the knife handle as the only element of the logo that breaks out of the rigid shapes of the two words: KITCHEN and NIGHTMARES.

This treatment also acts as a counterpoint (as in music) to the rhythm set up by all the capital letters. And the violence implicit in the knife’s being stuck in the "G" in NIGHTMARES is congruent with the overall horror-show ethos.

All of this has a bit of the Norman Bates’ vibe from Psycho. Everything works together. This is success.

When I first saw Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares logo, I was reminded of the rule that all capital letter design treatments impede readability, as does having essentially no leading between lines of type.

Then again, I also remembered a different axiom: Rules were meant to be broken.

Here’s why it works to have both words of the logo in all caps, set solid (no leading). It’s because the words are short and recognizable.

Usually, when you see a word in a typeface, you don’t read the letters, you recognize the shape of the word. For example, the word "logo," set in lowercase letters, has an ascender (the part of the "l" that extends above the height of the three other letters: the "o," "g," and "o") and a descender (the part of the "g" that extends below the baseline). When you’re reading numerous words one right after the other, the contour or shape around this word is what makes your mind grasp its meaning immediately, without needing to read (sound out in your head) all the letters.

This is not true with an all-caps treatment of a word: such as KITCHEN or NIGHTMARES. However, when you reduce your text treatment to only two words (at a large enough type size depending on the eyesight of the reader), you can get away with it.

And since the replacement of the "I" in KITCHEN with a knife uses a visual image rather than a letter of type, you’re already in the kitchen before your brain translates seven letters into a mental picture.

So everything supports the overall tone of the logo (horror and food). And since at this point I only have a large copy of the logo in black laser toner, I can only assume that it is equally recognizable at a small as well as large size (business card rather than printed collateral or wall-size banner) and that the colors used for the logo make it equally powerful.

(That said, I just Googled the logo online. I see treatments in black and blue: black for KITCHEN and blue for NIGHTMARES, as well as light blue overall, yellow only, white only, and black only. For me these work to a greater or lesser degree depending on the surrounding colors, but what stands out is the fact that the top of the kitchen knife in some versions of the logo on Google Images is much taller than the capital letters in the word KITCHEN. I think that the higher the knife handle sticks out above the rest of the word—within reason--the stronger the logo treatment is.)

Overall, I think this is an outstanding logo because it incorporates all the elements of good design. It uses a consistent treatment of type, as well as visual images worked into the type, to present a unified message that not only presents the name of the show but also reflects its tone or ethos.

That’s good design.

A Seven-Foot Theater Ticket

Actually it’s a mounted poster on a laminated wood background that my fiancee found at one of our thrift stores. At one time in history (presumably the Old West) this theater ticket was only a few inches long, but with modern technology it has been enlarged for posterity.

Interestingly enough, this poster treats an entertainment ticket as art (which is what such an enlargement does; it is akin to Pop Art, and it makes you look, in a different way, at something that is essentially functional or at least commercial art).

Online I looked up the time period for the ticket (which captures a point in time between 1840 and 1860, when the Ethiopian Minstrels were active). The Old West existed between 1865 and 1900, just after this ticket was initially printed. Therefore, I find it to be a repository of information on commercial design in and just before the Old West of the United States.

The first thing I noticed was the use of multiple typefaces, in all-caps treatment, as though each chunk of copy were trying to shout above all the others to get your attention. In short, these are all the design motifs current commercial art eschews. But here they work because this approach was the norm at that time.

Also, you can see a lot of slab serif typefaces in use. These are also called Egyptian typefaces, and their serifs and heavy, bold, and angular. They draw attention to themselves. In fact, if you Google the term "slab serif" and "The Wild West" you’ll find multiple articles on design pegging the typefaces to that exact time period. They look bold and (historically) masculine.

Between the text-heavy design, the absence of color, and the stereotypically masculine typefaces, as well as the minstrels (black-face, centuries before it was considered highly racist), this is a period piece from a vastly different culture than the present moment.

Curiously enough, were this poster printed today, it would have been digitized on a scanner and sent to the platesetter. When I entered the field of publications, I would have used a vertical press camera to make a high-contrast enlarged image from which the printer would have burned negatives prior to making the press plates. And back in the Wild West prior to 1875 the printing method of choice for this would have been letterpress, not offset lithography.

So this poster (as questionable and highly volatile as the subject matter might be) is nevertheless a snapshot of history.

[Steven Waxman is a printing consultant. He teaches corporations how to save money buying printing, brokers printing services, and teaches prepress techniques. Steven has been in the printing industry for thirty-three years working as a writer, editor, print buyer, photographer, graphic designer, art director, and production manager.]