Salt, Vinegar and a Clear First Line: Type Lessons from a Seaside Chippy

The rain was doing that sideways thing that only seems to happen in British seaside towns in November. I had ducked into a chippy near the promenade, ordered haddock and chips with mushy peas, and was waiting under a strip light that made everyone look slightly green. Then I looked up at the menu boards and forgot about the weather for a minute.

They were not precious. One board was hand-painted, another was a laminated sheet with a few prices updated by sticker, and a third was a specials sign so crowded it looked like a bus timetable after a timetable factory explosion. And yet, standing there with damp sleeves and a wooden fork in my hand, I knew exactly what to order. That is the bit that got me. The design was wonky, but the hierarchy was doing its job.

The first thing you see should be the job

On the main board, the biggest word was not the chip shop name. It was not a decorative flourish or a picture of a fishing boat. It was haddock. Then chips. Then the prices, lined up like they meant it. The board was telling me what it sold before it tried to be charming.

I think portfolios often get this backwards. We open with a logo, a texture, a moody photograph of a desk, or a sentence like 'Welcome to my creative world'. Meanwhile the visitor is standing there in the rain, metaphorically speaking, thinking: what is this, and is it for me?

A clearer first line might be: 'I design identity systems for small food businesses.' Or: 'Editorial illustration for magazines and community projects.' It does not have to be a mission statement. It just has to be the haddock. Put the job at the top. Let the personality come in the next line, where it can actually do some work.

Two sizes are usually enough

The hand-painted board used a big size for the main items and a smaller size for the details. That was it. The stickers added a third accidental size, but even they stayed in roughly the same place. The result was easy to scan from the door, even with rain on your glasses.

In portfolio land, we often convince ourselves that six type sizes, four weights and a colour-coded tagging system are the only way to show nuance. Usually, they are just noise with a font licence. I have been guilty of this. You add a caption size, then a sub-caption size, then a tiny legal line, and suddenly the page looks like a spreadsheet wearing a scarf.

A simple hierarchy will do most of the work: one display size for the project title or key statement, one body size for the explanation, one caption size for the practical details. If you need a fourth size, ask yourself whether it is doing a real job or just decorating the room. The chip shop menu does not have a 'conceptual micro-type' setting. It has large, small and please read the price.

Stickers are allowed to be honest

The price stickers on the board were slightly crooked. One was peeling at the corner. But they were all in the same column, and they all told me the same kind of information. They did not pretend to be headlines. A price sticker does not apologise for being a price sticker.

Portfolio captions could learn from that. The year, the client, your role, the medium: these are stickers. They should be consistent, legible and easy to find. They should not be dressed up in the same weight as the project title, and they should not be scattered around the page like confetti at a wedding nobody planned.

I like a caption that sits in the same place on every project. It makes the work feel considered without making the viewer hunt for the basics. The sticker is not the star. It is the useful little label that lets the star get on with it.

The specials board gets one shout

The specials sign was the loud one. It was crowded, a bit frantic, and covered in different handwriting. But it had a job: it was telling me what was available today and only today. It was allowed to shout because it was the exception.

A portfolio needs a specials board too, but only one. Maybe it is a featured project, a new piece of work, or a short note about being available for commissions. The mistake is making every project a special. If everything is in capital letters with a star next to it, the viewer stops believing the stars.

Pick one thing to shout about on the page. Let the rest speak at a normal volume. That is not boring. That is manners.

Margins are the vinegar

Here is where the chip shop really earned its keep. The menu boards had margins. Not fancy ones, not mathematically perfect ones, but enough space around the edges that the words did not feel like they were about to fall off the wall. The crowded specials sign was the exception, and it felt harder to read because of it.

Margins are the vinegar of layout. Too little and the whole thing feels claggy. Too much and you lose the chips. The right amount makes everything taste more like itself. In a portfolio, that means giving your work room to breathe on the page, letting captions sit away from the image edge, and not filling every spare pixel with a badge, a texture or a little arrow saying 'scroll'.

You do not need a grand grid system to get this right. You need a consistent edge, a bit of breathing room, and the discipline to stop adding things when the page is already full.

Order beats ornament

The menu went fish, chips, sides, drinks. It was not alphabetical. It was not arranged by colour. It was arranged by what a hungry person needs to know first. That is a useful test for a portfolio: what does a stranger need to know first, second and third?

Usually it is: what you do, proof that you do it, and how to get in touch. The decorative bits can come later, if they come at all. A scallop of clip art will not fix a confusing case study. A lovely texture will not rescue a page where the project title is hiding behind a photo of a fern.

By the time my haddock arrived, I had mentally rewritten half my portfolio homepage. The rain was still coming down, the seagulls were still loitering with intent, and the mushy peas were exactly right. But the lesson stuck: clear first line, few sizes, honest captions, one special, decent margins. The chip shop did not need a brand refresh. It just needed someone to read the board.

Next time you are in a chippy, look up before you look down at your chips. There is a type hierarchy lesson on the wall, and it comes with vinegar.