Assignment 6

PHOTO COLLAGES

^^Family-Friendly Ads by corporations that profit off the detention of immigrants in the U.S.

^^Selfie

DESIGN PRINCIPLES AND HISTORY REFLECTED IN THE WORLD: BOB’S RED MILL

I decided to go to a grocery store to see if I could find any references to historical design in food packaging/ads. Bob’s Red Mill immediately caught my eye — I’ve always thought of that brand as a holistic company, for no real reason. I’ve trusted it to be not horribly exploitative, even though I know nothing about it.

I checked out the packaging, which is very different from other kinds of food packaging. Whereas most are brightly colored with big branded lettering, Bob’s Red Mill appears understated, refined, and more physically transparent — it appears to be “about the goods.” In the typography, layout, and color choice, I recognized some design patterns that might explain why I, never having researched Bob’s in my life, so implicitly trusted it as a good brand. The design is humble, homely, and harkens to the arts & crafts era discussed in the Lynda history videos.

Firstly, there’s the unavoidable presence of Bob (the craftsman-artist) himself, named and pictured (hand-drawn), at the top of the product. It isn’t enough just that the product is named for and depicts Bob — we encounter plenty of products named for an (often fictionalized) person (Aunt Jemima, Mr. Clean), and yet those products feel completely mass produced and impersonal. There’s something about Bob — like Paul Newman, and Annie the bunny/namesake of Annie’s — that feels totally welcoming, down to earth, friendly, I just buy it…pun not intended. Why is that? Maybe it’s that he’s hand-drawn. But likely it’s that in conjunction with the other design elements that subtly say: hey, we’re not about this conglomerate lifestyle, we’re a small company with a real human at the helm making good goods.

So, to the design: let’s look at the brand lettering. It also appears to be hand-drawn, with a subtle flourish and teeny detail work within each letter that suggest time and love went into its creation. (Maybe Bob’s ever-supporting wife drew it for him while he was working away on the land.) Then there’s the color choice of the lettering — red, like our oldy timey favorite barns.

The layouts of each product vary — they are carefully, individually designed to showcase each different good — but there is consistency amongst them all (with a notable exception). All are symmetrical, with Bob’s Red Mill the only off-kilter thing about it. (Way to draw the eye to the brand!) They are all colored with very pleasing pastels that are easy to look at/complement each other well. The shapes and lines reference the arts & craft period — one that shifted focus away from mass produced, industrial labor practices, towards a more personal relationship with the land and product. The text boxes are pleasant soft edges (like embroidery) and there are little plant-inspired details (also like embroidery). One product even has a blue ribbon on it claiming “World’s Best Oatmeal” — another nod to the value of high quality goods. Altogether, it feels like a sentimental appeal for the consuming trends of the past.

Bob deviates slightly from these design motifs — sometimes utilizing flashy exclamation-like pizzaz shapes in a very, very, very subtle way…sometimes placing a photograph of a food on the packaging rather than utilizing a drawing or a clear portion that shows the actual product…sometimes employing a strange papyrus font. But the most notable of these is from a product that I imagine is more recent — Paleo Baking Flour — which adopts a drastically different approach that looks much more like Soviet constructivist than arts & crafts: geometric, bold, angular, rejecting the decorative, with a red/yellow/black color palette. It’s a bold move for a bold market — an attempt to stand out from the goods the baking layperson is attracted to, and to instead grab the eye of the intellectual paleo consumer.

Being aware of the historical context of this kind of design makes me appreciate that I am being lulled into thinking/believing something about a product that I don’t actually know as fact. It’s a visual manipulation that would go unnoticed if I wasn’t aware of the history.