Design Critique: Taking the Back of a Cereal Box From 95 Percent to 100 Percent

Today, we’re going to be looking at the back of the Quaker Oatmeal Square cereal. As a graphic designer, I am critiquing design everywhere I am, especially as a captive audience eating a bowl of cereal. So if we look at this design, what are the parts that I feel like could be a bit more polished? To take it from what I would call 95% professional to 100% professional, and that goal is that nothing could be moved in your composition without it looking wrong. You want the alignment to be so tight that everything is intentional. So a lot of times those finishing touches have to do with typography and alignment. Let’s look at this design. All right I have turned on guides in Photoshop. And what I would like to show you is a tool that I’ll often do is I will create a rectangle in Photoshop and draw out to the edge. So let’s say on this right side I can see an intentional alignment. So I’ve drawn a rectangle and then pulled a guide from the ruler over so that I have that. Now I want this internal margin. Or if we’re thinking in web design terms, padding to be even on both sides. So if I do this on the left side you can see that this is not quite aligned. And if I also rotate my rectangle and put that on the top, we can see it’s not quite aligned. So that final touch up for me is that this whole unit of text would move in some and down some. So now let’s look at the right side of text. So this is one of those things where right alignment has some nuances. So we have hanging quotation marks and hanging punctuation. And I would argue that a registered mark or an essay or term falls is punctuation and should be aligned to the right side of our alignment. Let’s work on that together. So the trick in Photoshop to be able to take advantage of the automatic text alignment is you’re going to come into type panels. If you do not have the latest Photoshop, it will be foldered a bit different, but you can still find your character panel, paragraph panel, and glyphs panel. So let’s look at our paragraph panel. In our paragraph panel first, by default, hyphenate is turned on. I almost never want hyphenation to happen automatically. I want to be able to copy right, and to update text in a way that I’m controlling, where the breaks are not automatic hyphenation. So we can see Roman hanging punctuation is available from the flyout panel, but it is grayed out. So why is that happening? Here’s the trick if you copy text, the only way you’re going to get that option to come up is to click and drag and make a character box or a text box, then paste your text in or hand type your text in. And now Roman hanging punctuation will be available if you just copy and paste your text in. It is not a true text box, or if you just do a click and type it in. Even if you do multiple. So this is still a line of text and you will not get the Roman hanging punctuation. But when you do a true text box, which is the click and drag with the text tool, you will now get Roman hanging punctuation and what you see is when I turn it on. Now if we zoom in, a right alignment means that the letters are aligned and the punctuation hangs outside of that vertical alignment. And that’s what I would challenge. That needs to happen here with the registered mark as well. I do have Roman hanging punctuation turned on, but Photoshop does not count that registered mark as hanging punctuation. But if we look at an example here, we can automatically move this over. So to move Quaker to the right, when we’re right aligned we’re going to use this option here. And we can track it. So we’re doing a negative number. And I have about a negative nine. And it looks correct. Now I also want you to notice that the visual align depending on how you have your settings for character, if you have it to metrics versus optical and what your font and your letter is, you might need to also adjust the letter so that it optically looks aligned. And you can see an example of that in the logo type for Taco Bell. When we look at the Taco Bell logo, we see that the letters are aligned with the stem of the T, not the edge of the arm. Let’s see how this will play out. So I have a similar font, not the exact one can see the hyphenation starts a lot of times almost all the fonts that I see. One of the updates I would typically make is to decrease the leading or the line spacing to make lines of text, especially in headlines, feel more like units type units that are close to each other, their proximity being closer. A lot of times the default letting is too much. All right. So if we align that that’s pretty similar. It still looks a little small. Now once I’ve changed the size I do have to adjust again in that paragraph how far it’s going to be over. So if I align again so important why you need guides in your design. And then you can see that the registered mark is much too big. So I can hand bring that down. Now when I change the size it also changes its height. Right. So I can grab that single character and I can move it up. And I want to align it with the top. This is a little bit different technique than just making it a subscript or a superscript because it is changing the size, but giving me complete control so I can still make it a little bit smaller if I wanted, and then still move its alignment up. And remember, you can also hand type it in. And now that that smaller again I’ll need to adjust that right for alignment. So you can see the designer part is really tweaking changing tweaking lots of little little things that are done. All right. If we come back and look at the original design, another thing that, I feel like it’s off is enlarged image should just be skewing it over and should support that vertical visual line. We have everything from the badged up at the bottom. That text. We can feel like this is track space, which is why I pulled it to the right and enlarged image should be over on the right as well. So for instance, I’m just using Proxima Nova and you can see that’s already helping to have this aligned. And I have a strong right line. We’re going to do the same thing when we turn on our guides and we see fresh fruit added as a serving suggestion, it’s popped over to the left. It should also be moved in. Nice. So if we turn back on our design, we can see move it in to the left and that supports this strong visual line on the left. All right. So those are fine tweaks. You know really using the merge and bringing everything in. So it looks like it could not be moved left or right without looking wrong. The next issue that I have is that I can see the intentionality of aligning these four pieces of content with the center of the spoon. Here’s the problem. If I put on my margins, I can see that this whole unit is moved further over to the left. Here’s my rectangle. This is a centered rectangle for this shape of text so we can see that it’s off. I want this whole unit a 47g of whole grains, over to 11g of protein to be moved over to the right and be truly centered. But the problem is then this line won’t be centered. So what are the things we can do? My solution and often designers need to work with the copy that they have in their designs to create alignment in unity. So there’s a few things here. First, we have one big top line and that works. Except that 47g of whole grains is too wide compared to the other titles, and therefore that’s why it’s not centered. So my solution would be that we move 47g and 11g to the second line. 47g per serving can still fit right here. 11g per serving can still fit on the second line. That would give us enough space that everything can move over. The other thing is we’re looking for consistency. So here we have two lines. Two lines. Now I have one line. Then I have three lines here. And so if I pull down a ruler I can see this is just hanging out way below where really we could align this text so that everything fits with the bottom and whole wheat flour. So how would we do that? Per serving with half cup of milk instead of per serving. With half cup of milk being three lines, bring it to two lines so that it’s consistent. Then see side panel for more information. Can easily align with this line of text here. There we go. So that would be a solution by also moving 11g per serving down one, we’re going to be able to move our entire group of text over so that it’s also centered. A final tweak that I would probably suggest is because whole grains and protein have more lines, I would move them to the center because that allows the extra space to move to the outside instead of being trapped on the inside. So that’s basically removing trapped internal space. So let’s pull this one up so that I can just show you. So this was when we aligned so that the subtext would align. And our titles would be closer. So we moved those grams down. But what we can see is we have extra space right here. And that’s kind of trapped on the inside. So the suggestion would be move the slightly taller ones to the middle so that we’re moving that extra space to the outside. All right. So again small tweaks really making our designs super tight so that everything feels really intentional and aligned. One final thing that I would probably do as well is space out the letting a bit and more intentionally and line this bad with this text. So I like that the corner of this oatmeal square is kind of pointing to the text I would rather have it point exactly to with their signature, and then increase the letting so that there’s a little bit more breathing room between all of these lines of text and delicious start to your morning is at the bottom, and with their signature satisfying crunch aligns right there. So I feel like that would be one final tweak that would make a really nice change. And that’s probably the same even here, because we can see that the spacing is much tighter, and Quaker oatmeal squares between the lines of text than it is here. And that’s because we have this descender and the why and how do we align for that? But this would probably space out even a little bit more to you, because that’s what we’re having here. Is that descender with the F as well. Again, these fine tweaks allow us to take something that’s 95% of the way to 100%, where everything feels aligned and couldn’t be moved without looking at a place. All right. So I hope this helped you as you start to look through your designs. And once you think you’re finished, you take that extra critical eye and do all the alignments that you possibly can so that nothing feels out of place. Happy designing.