Bizarre Branding

A new branch of Pizza Express opened in Balham over the weekend and we went in to try it out last night.

Whilst I was looking around the restaurant, my eyes were drawn to a decoration on the wall which consisted of an apparently random pattern of spotlights that were shining through a wooden panel attached to the wall. Eventually I realised that the patterns weren’t random as they were repeated. I started to see them as some kind of code that needed to cracked.

From somewhere deep in my memory I dredged up the fact that Braille characters are represented as 3×2 patterns of dots. And the pattern of lights was three rows deep. By breaking the pattern into Braille-sized chunks I found that the longer repeating sequences contained a much larger number of shorter repeating patterns which were probably letters.

As I was in a Pizza Express, I tested the theory that the phrase was “Pizza Pizza Express” (which is what they often have written on the signs outside their restaurants) and was surprised to see that it fitted exactly – the characters for P, Z, E and S repeated at exactly the right places.

I memorised some of the characters so that when I got home I could check them against a Braille alphabet. And I was right. That is what the lights say.

So someone decided that it was a good idea to spell out the Pizza Express slogan in lights in Braille. Twice.

I wonder if it appears in any more of their restaurants. And I wonder how many other customers have noticed it.

If you want to check your local branch, it looks like this:

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