food products 2

The last food products start with this, which I found at Walmart looking for a bad example, and instead found a good example of typography (it’s a lot harder to find something bad than I thought). This product in particular stood out to me from the rest of the “good” typography examples initially because of the unique case of the letter “U.” They use a smiley face as the U, which in itself adds a lot of visual interest to the product to distinguish itself from the other products a bit. But they stop that uniqueness there at the branding of the product, it’s now time for the rest of the information to come across. Though that’s not to say that there isn’t room to still be creative with how to present the text. For example, the next two instances of text, “Fig Bar” and “10 Twin Packs” use a surrounding box that inverts the foreground and background colors for the text and the box. In a way, this inverted appearance can resemble a fig bar, the box being the bar and the text being the filling. It’s a creative way to present the text and adds more visual interest without being disruptive to the product as it uses the same two colors in the background and in the text. Next they indicate the flavor of Raspberry clearly after this series of inverted colors. It’s a slightly smaller type size than the rest of the previous text, but by breaking the visual flow from “regular” to inverted and back to regular, that switch back to regular can add a form of visual emphasis.

On the flip side, also found at Walmart, is the final food product than is an example of typography I’d consider bad. If we take the previous example, it only uses two colors yet it kept itself interesting with the switch up of using an inverted color palette for the text. This bag of chips however, isn’t promoting many forms of visual interest. The most interesting and emphasized piece of text on here is the brand itself, a giant “KETTLE” followed by the word “Brand” just to make sure the viewer gets the point. Aside from that, each piece of text after comes in varying sizes that isn’t all that noticeable and slightly irritating. “Brand” is the same size as or perhaps slightly smaller than “Potato Chips,” “Potato Chips” is the same size as “Backyard” which is smaller than “Barbeque” but larger than “great taste... naturally.” The most emphasis they attempted to put into this product was varying degrees of size changes, none of which really doing anything. Along with the text on the product being the same color, everything feels visually stale. The biggest change I see they did is go from a brown to a brighter orange background, which personally still hasn’t done anything for the visual hierarchy. This product could take a few pointers from the previous example and try inverting the foreground and background for the text with the orange background, which possibly creates some visual interest very easily.