not my type

(Alternate title: What happens when a hugely successful company doesn't have an in-house designer.)

The image of the little girl with the baguette is staged: it's of the award-winning photographer Stephen Rothfeld's child, and was part of the series of images for the cookbook "Nancy Silverton's Breads From La Brea Bakery."

I was there for the photo-shoot that day, way back when I was Campanile / La Brea Bakery co-owner Manfred Krankl's assistant. It's a sweet image that everyone on staff fell in love with.

Sadly, and oddly, on the croissant label the picture of girl and her bread has been stretched. But that's not the worst of it. Some ugly type has been lazily slapped onto image with no visual hierarchy, the colors of the bakery's iconic logo have been altered, and an oversized border has been put around the whole thing—it's just bad, bad, bad.

I have a long critique about this croissant label. It made me so upset that I couldn't even eat one. Oh how the mighty have fallen, I kept muttering to myself.

My boyfriend happily ate them all over a couple of days and exclaimed they were delicious. Perfectly flaky pastry trumps design.