Posts Tagged ‘ packaging design ’
The title of this editorial says it: O, Beautiful!
If you had nothing but color and one typeface to design new packaging, this would be a great solution. Proof again that you don’t need thousands of typefaces to create good typography.
I was in New York yesterday, taking photographs for a magazine article and realized what a great opportunity I had to gather content for type eh?
But rushing around to get to appointments left me scrambling until the end of the day when the light was beginning to fade.
And then, walking onto Fifth Avenue, these graphics appeared and stopped me in my tracks. Well to be fair there was a red light.
The graphics, designed by Pentagram, where I had been at the very beginning of the day, was a nice coincidence. They were originally part of a packaging and branding assignment designed by Pentagram a few years ago (shown at the end of the post) that references a cursive signature used by Saks in the 1970s.
Pentagram created the signature inside a grid of 64 squares which can be shuffled and rotated into an almost infinite number of permutations.
While I was listening to Al Spoler and Hugh Sisson talk about wine on NPR this evening, Al, or maybe it was Hugh said something like “The wine was ok, but the label was really something.”
It seems that we are witnessing a lot of great wine label design.
I enjoyed this bottle of Shiraz over the weekend which I thought was pretty good, but the label is really something. The primary type is a distressed face. The word Paringa (see below) is cropped to the edge, the description is off square, suggesting drunkenness … maybe.
There are in fact two labels on the bottle. The last, of the Aussie figure in the Paringa vineyard, is the primary identifier which is above the typographic portion.
Shoe boxes are not a place I expect to see utilized for typography. The top of the box spells out the brand in the typeface Gotham Light, in a spacious, centered configuration giving it the appearance of an expensive brand.
Gotham, incidentally, is an excellent typeface from the Hoeffler company.
When the box is opened, the underside of the lid reveals a contrasting treatment using a condensed weight in the Helvetica family … a nice surprise. And nice too that even the tissue paper uses type. The pattern is a third element that creates a branding experience using type alone.
This 1987 LP record cover … yes kids a vinyl record, beautifully demonstrates how the simple choice of a typeface can reinforce the meaning of a word. The typeface is Univers 49 light ultra condensed. The price and includes stickers were not removed when I bought the album. Design is credited to Stylorouge.
This clothing tag caught my eye.
The typeface is Helvetica. Extreme kerning creates a rather distinctive logotype. The quote at the end is the brandmark for Joe’s Jeans. It’s all good.
In packaging design the notion of working with just two typefaces is the exception rather than the rule.
This series of wine labels uses a strong calligraphic theme to give the line a distinct look and the use of calligraphy reinforces the names of the wines: King’s Bastard, Kings Favor and so on. An appropriate typographic choice is key to the brand.
These words are drawn calligraphically, so don’t look for this typeface.
The website for this wine is magnificent and typography plays a major role. It’s certainly worth taking a look.
The images below are grabbed from the website to show the calligraphy large. And although they look like the actual labels, they are not. On the bottles the calligraphy is on a contrasting white background.
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type eh? 