Tom's Look At The Visual Side Of Snacks And Candy - Bag From McDonald's Canadian Edition

Hello, again. If you are a Candy Critic follower in Canada, you may have seen the food package in the photo below:

Recently, McDonald’s introduced a version of a food item that’s uniquely identified with Canada and especially the French-Canadian population. I’m not here to talk about the food itself but to comment on the package.

In design terms, lettering is known as a “font” which refers to the style of the type as well as it’s size and degree of ‘boldness’. In the above photo, the container is a neutral grey/brown with strong black letters. The word “Poutine” doesn’t carry across the surface in one piece. Typically, when a word is ‘broken’ it is done so after a syllable. If you sound out where the syllable break would occur, it’s pretty obvious why the word is broken the way it is. Even with the popularity of the “poop” emoji in relation to some food items (muffin and candy moulds for example) it seems McDonald’s opted not to have a word fragment that sounds like “poo” on it’s exciting new food option.

The second photo reveals another reason for the unusual word break in “poutine”. It seems the current design model calls for non-traditional word breaks in favour of a bold visual. The plain, brown bag gets a splash of red from the large, bold letters. What’s remarkable is that the designers were allowed to push a well-known trademark to the brink of being illegible. A company’s trademark is a big deal. It takes time to build a solid identity and once established, it is guarded diligently. It says a lot about the strength and recognition factor that the logo was played with to such a degree.

At a glance, it looks like three words are shown. Once again, the word does not break on the syllables, as is typical in text handling design. “McD” is a strong identifier and may even evoke the familiar nickname “Mickey-D’s”. The second two letters are greatly enlarged and seem to form the word “on”. The third line has the letters “ald’s” and is the strangest element when taken on it’s own. Fortunately, the three lines of word fragments are packed in a tight design block that allows the viewer to take in the elements as one. With the trademark red colour used in tandem with the commonly used font associated with McDonald’s, the true identity is easy to puzzle out.

Next time you sit down to enjoy your order of McDonald’s, you may find you look at it with new eyes.

Tom

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