Sunday 11 November 2018

SPOTLIGHT ON: TAG Heuer Carrera Bamford Basketball Special Edition


In theory, I don't have a problem with Bamford. The idea that you can pay to have your watch customised to your own tastes is fine by me and I don't really understand why it bothers some people so much. However, it seems like every few days I get exposed to some new Bamford special edition and while some of them are okay, for the most part they aren't exactly topping my wish lists.

And then there's this... thing. For once I can see why people are irritated, because this is HORRENDOUS!

Orange is a divisive kind of colour at the best of times, but this particular orange (along with that textured dial) is particularly noxious and it doesn't help that the lines on the face look like they've been drawn on with a stick. Then there's the day/date windows... what on Earth has gone on there? I imagine the original watch has an hour marker at the three position, but as they've taken them away the windows are left floating in the middle of the dial and look absolutely ridiculous.

Then there's the text at the bottom which seemingly applied randomly, completely ignoring where the black lines are... and again, it looks like they've designed this with the markers in place and then taken them off, leaving everything on the dial squashed into the middle for no apparent reason.

But what is perhaps most worrying/upsetting/enraging (delete as applicable) is that once this was drawn up, someone didn't look at it and say 'No'. Because somebody absolutely needed to say No! Taste is subjective, but this is not just a matter of taste, this is actually badly designed, and if it came up on eBay I'd probably report it as fake (if I didn't know better).


Five minutes of rudimentary photoshopping later and it still looks bad, but it looks better balanced!

Bamford have a great opportunity as TAGs bespoke design partner, but they need to get their act together. This is just plain awful, and it wouldn't hurt for them to widen their scope a bit as well. Why do they only seem to offer three basic models to customise?

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