Sometime last year, the Shop & Shop and Giant (of Landover) grocery store chains began introducing redesigned packaging for their store brand products. The two chains share a parent company and share branding, so the labels only use the shared logo without a brand name. The old label designs heavily featured a white background, which made them easy to locate in the store.1 The new brand identity is less distinct, but whether it’s better or worse is a matter of taste. However, there are specific design decisions that were made on some of the labels that have fundamental issues.
In particular, I will focus on the labels for canned vegetables. As one would expect, both the old and new label designs feature the name of the vegetable along with a picture of a “serving suggestion.” Since many vegetables are similar in color, it is often easier to find one’s desired vegetable on the shelf by looking for the name, especially when a particular vegetable comes in multiple variants, such as green beans (whole, cut, diagonally cut, and French style). The old design featured a plain sans-serif font in a dark color on a solid white background, resulting in good contrast and readability. The new design, however, is a clear regression; it trades the consistent, easily readable font for a hodgepodge of different heavily-stylized display fonts on a busier background with lower contrast, which results in much worse readability. This loss of readability makes it take longer to locate a particular product on the shelf.
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