Roz & Mocha poster with adjusted type to reflect the mistake in the poster.

Dear Roz and Mocha, you need to have a conversation with your graphic designers. Of course you are not the first public figures guilty of using letters from languages you can’t read to imply inclusiveness and multiculturalism. The same often appears on posters of local politicians running for office in Toronto and other cities with considerable multilingual populations. At one point the same happened on Live Green cards distributed in the city. But you are friendlier and more fun than politicians, aren’t you? You wear a loose tie and cool shades afterall.

The Farsi and Arabic letters on your poster in TTC are backwards and disjointed. For starters the letters should be written from right to left and be connected to one another. I haven’t had a chance to ask friends who speak Hindi, Korean and Hebrew to check the rest of the scripts but would be happy to send you a nice file with the word Listen in Farsi and Arabic to replace what currently reads “didn’t give shoog(?)”.

I’m sure this poster was designed with the best intentions, to tell all Torontonians and even those who are not yet proficient in English, that there is a fun friendly show that welcomes them. But it is backfiring big time. With every trip your posters on the TTC make across the city you are telling folks that you want to appear worldly to those who can only read English. Now that’s a really small population in Toronto!