Great Packages Have Type Appeal

Well-done and clever typography makes packages stand out

This month’s FontShop e-newsletter throws a timely spotlight on packaging made appealing by well-done type. We here at Designorati:Typography were particularly compelled by two examples therein.

A trip down the market shelves these days shows all sorts of design paths taken, and, as usual, there is a great deal of design out there–some good, some, well, not so much. It is a truth writ large somewhere, we are sure, that where there is a lot of design, there is not a lot of design that works. It’s also sometimes surprising how far a typographic approach will take a product.

Izze’s refereshingly basic approach to package design (courtezy Izze Beverage)

One very good example FontShop shows us is the packaging for the Izze beverage brand. Izze is available nationally now, though unheard of in 2001. How could it have grown so fast and so strongly with no advertising, internet or otherwise? We aren’t sure, but we agree with FontShop when they suggest that perhaps the type is the thing.

Izze’s appearance comes across as refreshingly basic: Trade Gothic majuscules and a graphic symbol that makes one think of pehaps a cross section of a fruit, done in colors appropriate to each flavor–but the clever part here is that it’s not purely graphic but typographical; the “splat” in the middle of the circle is a freejack Caslon asterisk.

Maybe the clean graphic style (in concord with the typical Izze beverage, basic and refereshing–simply fruit juice and sparkling water) did have something to do with its popularity. We can personally attest to its attention-grabbing style, which stands out well from the other bottles and cans on the shelves of our local Target.

Communicating Hand-crafted Goodness

Another apt example is the packaging employed by Kettle Foods, of Salem, Oregon. Long known as a company that produces snack foods with a more healthful bent–Kettle Chips are available nationwide these days–it started as a cottage company in the early 1980s with selling nuts and handcrafted nut butters.

Handcrafting, wholesome naturalness, and good taste: Kettle. (Courtesy Kettle foods)

The Kettle packaging regime communicates very well. Roughly rendered but friendly and approachable, the message of healthfulness and hand batch-production is conveyed ably, and when one goes to the website and finds that Kettle is the kind of company that runs its cars on biodiesel obtained from its own used frying oil and puts up new flavors for the vote of its customers, one is somehow not surprised. And most brands communicate with appropriate color, and most of all, type.

Design such as this ‘paints pictures’ with type, inviting the shopper to fill in a world of good-quality healthful, beneficial products in thier mind with no pictorial input at all. When the design is true to the aims of the company (and, by extension, the products one purchases), it becomes a powerful and positive way of making the product stand out and away–sometimes even without the juggernaut of a national advertising campaign.