Searching through various package design blogs, one of the trends I continued to stumble upon was the use of typography in a more textural or abstract form. In these designs, type appeared to double as an image or pattern. Words are tiled, cropped, or enlarged and breaking the boundaries of the box. Some of the typography appears playful, utilizing the dimensionality of the container to abstract or enhance the role of typography in packaging design. Heavily typographic products seem to focus straightforwardly on the actual product, the brand being a side note. While packaging has been around since humans began producing items to sell, I can’t seem to pinpoint the beginning of these particular trends. When iconic brand names and cartoon characters grace the grocery store shelves, I can’t imagine that it’s something too old.
Many of the products I looked at in terms of packaging were food items. Typography was the dominant design element, yet it was informative—“hot chocolate”, a list of ingredients, and the brand at the bottom secondary to the product itself. I found this to be intriguing, as it seems to defy what we would think of as a standard package design. You wouldn’t catch a Coca Cola logo secondary to “soda pop” on the bottle’s label. It’s interesting how designers are toying with the idea of informational hierarchy in these products, since often many brands and the people who purchase them rely upon what is comfortable or recognizable to the consumer. Many of the designs I read about talked about simplifying information to the basics. Batteries in Japan use a number system (1, 2, 3, 4…), so one design firm chose to simplify their package design down to the number itself and eliminate unnecessary detail.
Other designers are using the textural/abstracted typography as a more formal approach. A lot of the work that I pulled from Asylum’s portfolio appeared more decorative in comparison. They create texture with the word “happiness” while the brand name “Chocolate Research Facility” rests in a quiet corner of the box. This also seemed to be the case with designer Kashiwa Sato, who would take one type treatment and apply it to all sorts of objects—everything from packaging to apparel, buses and buildings. While it differentiates from the idea of simplifying information, I find it interesting how an “identity” is created through that pattern of heavy typography, even if it’s not always applied at the same scale or cropped the same way. With this application of text, type truly does seem to double as imagery.
Packaging is, of course, something done to appeal to a customer and ultimately persuade them to buy. We gravitate towards brand we recognize and are familiar with, but a lot of the packaging I encountered seems to question this idea and places the product first. In a world where the hamburger on the box looks nothing like the hamburger inside of it, this sort of honesty seems quite refreshing.
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2 comments:
your observations about hierarchy make me wonder what happens when you begin to play around with that. for example, what happens if you take an existing package, scan it in, and re-size all the type pieces to create new hierarchies? maybe not what you had in mind, but might produce some interesting results. probably tons of other ideas in this area though...
so i'm wondering where your questions are that are guiding this work. i know what you've been playing with and wonder where it might go next. if you have those questions recorded, you will be able to revisit them with new info gleaned from your design studies. sometimes going out exploring and then looping back around with your new knowledge can be fruitful. you might think of those questions in new ways, eliminate others, or think of new questions altogether. but getting them recorded somewhere is a good first step.
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