On Saturday, I walked past a new restaurant, which I believe opened earlier this month. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed not to notice the place, since it had two huge signs in the window. However, I think they went a little bit overboard with the text itself, which proclaims that the restaurant is “Now open for business”.

Sure, it’s a straightforward message. But it’s also twice as long as it needs to be. After all, simply saying “Now open” conveys the same message in half as many words, which increases the chance that passers-by will read and understand it.

If you think about it, this is just another application of the Occam’s Razor principle. By choosing the shortest version of the message and eliminating superfluous words, the restaurant could have produced a much simpler solution for their communications needs. Hopefully they’ll figure this out before spending too much money on other marketing channels, since I’d hate to see a website or print ad that was filled with the same type of extraneous words that made their window signage so disappointing.