A Broad look at Cereal Design

Even though i am designing a soap box i feel that it is still worth looking at cereal boxes to find out what techniques that they use... 

Elements  - When looking at the colours and gradients of these three examples I can say that photography is used a lot more in cereal boxes than there is in soapboxes. Therefore it has a lot more colours due to the vast range in colours. Looking at the colours and gradients in the corn flakes cover I can say that Kellogg’s has kept to the classical colours of the logo on a white background but then adding a bevel and emboss effect to the shapes that create the chicken. Then looking at the chocolaty squares I can see that the design is trying to be kept under the ides that brown equals chocolate. Then when looking for gradients there is very light ones on the tails of the cereal illustrations that gives the effect of flying fast. This effect is the repeated by the tesco brand of rice snaps, along with using a blue background. The way these different designs work with their colours and gradients is very different. This is because with the rice snaps the gradient on the flying rice snaps it gives the effect of the rice flying out of the brown. Where as with the choc squares the gradient tail effect is still used but this time it is as if the squares are flying from the middle of the box. And finally the way that the cornflakes design works is with the bevel and emboss being structured from the right of the page it seems as if the light is shining from the right.

 

Typography -Looking through the design of the cornflakes box I can see that the repetition of colours does not happen a lot because there is only four colours of font. These are black, white, yellow and red. This is a professional technique because by using not too many different colours it is not making the design seem too busy. This analysis is the same for chocolaty squares and rice snaps because they use the same amount of fonts. Looking at the way that coloured typefaces differ from the black text is at the use of coloured text creates a blended look in the design where as the use of black text has a very sharp look in the design for example on the cornflakes box the text corn flakes is very bold text and that is what you see first. Looking at how the logo is strengthened in typography and graphics I can as the with the tesco brand it is just a light blue tone of typography with no graphical used. Where as the logos for Kellogg’s and mornflake have a logo that does not have such a sharp outline where as it is more a curved edge font. But once again there has been no graphical applied to the Kellogg’s but there has been as stroke applied to the mornflake logo. Looking at how many fonts faces are on these boxes I have reviewed the boxes and on average the boxes have around 5 different font faces applied to the box design. Then looking at all boxes and analysing the effects I can see the use of bevel and emboss, stroke, solid colours and gradients.