Aaron Tarelo

Tag: design

  • best fonts to use in your next design free online no glue no borax

    best fonts to use in your next design free online no glue no borax

    A designers most time-consuming hobby is finding suitable fonts. I am no stranger to scrolling on adobe fonts, dafont, or myfonts trying to find something interesting. Here are some that I’ve discovered that will for sure sit in your favorites for all eternity!

    Benton Modern Display by Dyana Weissman and Richard Lipton

    I am a big fan of thin and clean looking fonts, but they must be serif!!! As to not run the risk of being mistaken for a Rae Dunn font #derogatory. The only good thing a Rae Dunn font was in was Poor Things. Anyways, I enjoy this font because its comes in a very large array of styles so it can be used in a variety of situations. We use serifs mostly for body copy so it can be a real treat when we can use different styles of the same font so we’re not so boring!

    Luke by Hidetaka Yamasaki

    Blackletter typefaces will always have a special place in my heart. It reminds me of the gothic things that I am very drawn to. This one in particular, just like the last, has several styles. 12 to be exact. And some of them have a fun 2-tone effect (see below). Highly stylized fonts like this only have a number of real-life use cases. Such as word-mark, emphasis, art, or titles. Basically, if we stick within the standards of design we use fonts like these only a few times.

    OCR A by American Type Founders

    Now here is a good mix between style and readability!!! Very cool retro-futuristic kinda look going on here. And I love that the designer included ASCII art they made with their own font! I think this could be used for mostly anything in a design; but still maybe not for large paragraphs of text since it is sans-serif, so it could be a bit harder to read. Playing with the font color is fun also; if we use a black background with green text it could emulate an old terminal. Many fun use cases with this one.

  • IMHO: product packaging

    IMHO: product packaging

    Be warned: this is an opinion post!

    no one asked but here it is anyways! This iteration of “In My Humble Opinion” we’re gonna take a look at a few examples of tacky, outdated, or just plain bad product packaging.

    Makeup

    It is so unfortunate that items which are beauty related are some of the worst offenders. I have had multiple experiences of walking inside of a Sephora or an Ulta and an item catches my eye. And not in a good way. A lot of these products look like they could be sold in the TikTok shop for a suspiciously low price. Although, these stores know their audience is mostly on the younger side, so maybe it’s on purpose? I feel as if these products just expect you to know what they are and do; not very beginner friendly.

    • 1: Bad readability, why is half of the text one orientation and the other is not??? and the “sunset” logo is not helping.
    • 2: Bad contrasting, brownish gold product with gold type on top of it? cmon now…
    • 3: Tacky, the container looks like a toy to me. Especially with this horrible font. I will not be taking you seriously!!!

    Cooking oils

    As someone who loves to cook and loves design, I like treating cooking the same as creating art. With that, I expect my tools to look the part! Oil is used in almost every dish imaginable, so why do some companies insist on god-awful packaging? Not everything has to be in a glass container or beautifully illustrated at every turn, but we have to update our products out of the 2000s cmon guys.

    • 1: This is very controversial to put on this list! But this is an opinion piece. My gripe is not with the imagery, or text, or anything on the label really. I think that part was done pretty awesome-ly. My quoral is with the plastic package. Graza is a more “mellenial/artsy/trendy” oil brand. Which is fine, but I’d like to this brand adopt a glass container since it leans more towards the “artsy/consious” crowd.
    • 2: Are we so for real right now. I do not want to be putting freaking oil from a DETERGENT container into my food!!! It literally looks like they are re-using motor oil containers. Absolutely not, pick a different package man.
    • 3: I’ve never heard of this brand, and this is a bad first impression. Why is the text oriented landscape? We have to imagine our products existing in the space where our audience will see it. Oils will be in a groccery store next to other brands; why would we want our potentional customers to tilt their heads just to read what we’re trying to sell?

    Honey

    Just like all products everywhere, it’s hard trying to stand out in a sea of competitors. Honey is no different.

    • 1: Immediately too many words. There is not stream of reading after “Raw Honey”. They are using paragraphs to describe their honey making process instead of imagery or words. Too busy for almost anyone.
    • 2: Bleed. The words are too close to the edge of the label. I read somewhere that most people interpret how important a piece of text is based on how much blank space is around it. The more space the more important; it dates back to medival times when paper was a comidity so only printing a few words on a whole sheet would be seen as stupid unless the text is significant. Anyways, the words almost coming off of the label make it look lazy.
    • 3: Very iconic container. The bear is very fun very cool very nice. Why ruin it by jamming so much text and detail on such a small label. I could barely recognize the bee in the middle, and the realistic sky behind it does not make it better. The label is too small to fit this much detail; and just like the last example the text is almost falling off of the label. The slightly darker yellow stroke on “Topanga Quality Honey” on an already yellow background is just terrible also.