Design Evaluation

Kellogg’s Special K line of cereals come in packages ranging in quality from mediocre to acceptable. While it’s difficult to outline what exactly is lacking, their designs indisputable could be improved. For now, we’ll focus on the shortcomings of the “fruit and yogurt” edition.

Why the packaging of these cereals are so feminine escapes me. Maybe they cut a deal with the bacon and eggs advertising department, but this product has appeal to both sexes at its heart, and still it incorporates soft, low-intensity colors and non-threatening curves (notice the giant K). Over the likes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch (diabetes in a box), Special K has potential with the health conscious crowd, but to this end it’s a bit overdone. It looks like something your doctor might prescribe. The design is needlessly cluttered with graphics and information. Furthermore, the package could benefit from a consistent color theme rather than blue, white, red, purple, a bit of black, and some shades of tan.

However, the current Special K design’s failings are most obvious when held against a proposed design from student Mun Joo Jane. This project offers a unique, cylindrical package with a bolder and more focused theme. Altogether it makes for a much more appealing product.

While the boxed package comes off cluttered, distinctly feminine, and slightly childish, Jane’s creation is refreshingly simple yet innovative, universally appealing, and mature. The “tube” boasts consistent reds and blacks on a simple white background that allows our focus to travel to where it really matters. The Gestalt law of pragnanz suggests a human preference for simplicity, and this product takes advantage of this to a much greater degree than the box. Opposite the current design, the tube is gender neutral, and strong, with a bold K+ replacing a dated, glossy K. This product refuses to buy into the way cereal is typically marketed toward children with bright colors and a collage of graphics (a smart move given how kids would probably react to the taste of the stuff). It isn’t specifically a man’s breakfast or a woman’s breakfast, but it’s got a sense of order that makes it an adult’s breakfast. Even though the Kellogg’s logo is smaller on Jane’s design, it still preserves brand identity better given that it’s one of very few graphics, and a red one at that, contrasting a clean, white base.

Although Kellogg’s design exhibits texture by presenting an enlarged image of rough, gritty flakes, the alternative accomplishes the same thing with a transparent window that lets the product speak for itself, and there’s a charismatic sense of honesty and genuineness to that. Plus, the cereal contrasts better against a white background than a cluttered, purple mess.

All in all, this student-designed product would have my eyes and wallet well before the current, so-so packaging due to its elegance, simplicity, and incorporation of design principles.