30 November 2007

I have a love/hate relationship with cereal.

In grocery stores (if you haven’t noticed) the healthier cereals are on top, and the sugary, unhealthy cereals are on the bottom. Generally, health-conscious adults are tall, and children who don’t know any better are short. Marketers take advantage of this human growth cycle to sell stuff to us. I think it’s kind of sick, but heck, that’s just smart business, right? You might also detect a gradual shift of healthy-sugary mix on the middle shelf.

And then there’s the design of the cereal boxes themselves. Corresponding the nutrition of the food entombed you’ll typically find fun, energetic designs for cereal that’ll give you a sugar overdose, and old-fashioned or classic, stable designs for cereal with a more respectable nourishment level.

Matthew McNerney wrote about an encounter with cereal box design in I Vant To Eat Your…Face? He shows us cereal boxes slowly pushing actual food off the cover in favor of enviable characters, noting “…it seems that demographics studies and marketing agencies have gone the Nike route and have stopped selling a product, and started selling an idea.”

None of this is profound news, I’m sure. Yet, evidently a problem enough for PBS to dedicate part of their website to teaching kids ‘the secrets of selling’ and how to spot an ad that tries to “convince you to buy and do things.” You can even design your own cheeky cereal box.

Room for admiration, if not redemption.

There are many interesting psychological things happening here that I only intuitively understand. Last night, I went to our local grocery store to pick up a few things for my wife and, while I was there, I took a photographic survey of nearly every box of cereal they had.

I am often frustrated with the dark ways of marketers trying to sell me their goods — or else amused by the ridiculous icons of breakfast food — but when I looked closer at these boxes of cereal, I saw that there are some fantastic typographic illustrators working hard to sell us a box of cereal. If ever you’re a passive passerby, let not this be the time. I recommend you take a closer look next time you’re in the market for a cereal breakfast.