Brands

Vic’s Mix

In February 2012 a new snack company came to me with a product and nothing around it. Vic’s made fruit and nut mixes in several varieties, and they needed the whole brand: a logo, a label for each variety, packaging, business cards, flyers, and an online store. They were clear about one thing. The mixes had to read as organic and healthy.

February to July 2012
15 logo directions, around 40 exports

Creating the logo

I started bold. A warm logotype that could reach around the customer, simple enough to draw a new one in.

Vic’s liked these, with one note: the font was too heavy. Nobody asked me to prove the note, but I wanted to see the far end of it, so I cut the weight much further than they had asked for.

Seeing it thin sent them the other way. Vic’s decided the heavier weight was closer to what they had pictured, and chose the first round. Then color. I pulled the palette out of the mixes themselves, so the brand colors came off the product rather than out of a swatch book.

Then the experiment came back with a verdict I had not gone looking for. Vic’s compared the logos and labels internally, then showed the thin versions to their customers. Most customers picked the thin ones. The client wanted heavy. The people buying the bags wanted light.

The compromise was a middle weight. I took a heavier mark out of the light batch and thickened it for readability, keeping the openness customers had responded to without giving up the substance the client wanted.

Packaging & Label Design

Every variety got its own label and its own packaging. Each label also carried a full nutrition panel, the block of required type every food package has to make room for.

The Vic’s Mix label on two packages side by side: the 10 oz bag and the small pouch — The mark did not have to survive a white board. It had to survive a label laid over a window of seeds. On the large bag it has room; on the pouch it does not, and at that size the weight this post spends its length arguing about stops being a matter of taste and starts being legibility. Left is the packaging comp from February 2012. Right is the image the shop’s own homepage carried, 300 pixels wide.

The Vic’s Mix nutrition facts panel, ingredients and allergen lines, ending on the Vic’s Mix mark — This block is not mine. A nutrition panel arrives as supplied art from the lab, type already outlined and proportions already fixed, and the packaging job is to build a bag that makes room for it rather than argue with it. The only thing on this plate I drew is the mark at the bottom, which is the whole relationship in one image: the required type takes what it takes, and the brand signs what is left.

The mixes went out to stores nationwide and found a following with hikers and bike riders, who wanted something they could eat without stopping.

The part I kept is the weight test. I ran it to answer a note about a font, and it produced the only real evidence on the project: the client’s taste and the customers’ taste pointed opposite ways, and the answer was between them. I had worked for these people since 2009, on an earlier store of theirs, and I was still opening the Vic’s label files years later.

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