If you have any social media account, particularly Instagram or Facebook, you may have seen people advocating for the consumption of apple cider vinegar to aid weight loss. Yes, a simple salad dressing is one of the diet industry’s new crazes, favoured and endorsed by celebrities such as Victoria Beckham and Katy Perry. But how did an ingredient turn into a health fad? You guessed it…typography played a significant role.
The Ketogenic Diet, most commonly referred to as ‘Keto’, was originally a diet plan made to treat epilepsy in children, but, of course, it was later adopted by the diet industry as a method of weight-loss. Unlike many other diet products, a lot of the branding and typography used in Keto products are targeted towards men.
Flat Tummy Co., a company infamous for Kim Kardashian’s promotion of their hunger-restricting lollipops, is perhaps one of the clearest examples of what I spoke about in my last post: using their typography to target young women.
When I asked my followers on Instagram, “What colour do you associate with the diet industry?”, unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority said Pink. But why is that such an obvious answer? Why do diet products so often feature this colour? In this article, I will be exploring the use of pink in diet products, as well as the use of typography, to seek to answer the question of what result diet companies are hoping to elicit.
Whether you realise it or not, the diet industry directly impacts our day-to-day lives, so much so, that is becoming increasingly unlikely that anyone could go a day without eating food that has not been given a nutritional value. But how does typography play a role in defining what is ‘good’ food and what is ‘bad’? To understand that, we must analyse the way in which brands present themselves and their packaging.
Ask anyone, your aunt, your uncle, your friend or distant cousin…it seems that everyone knows someone who has been to WeightWatchers. But what is it that makes them such a popular platform and their services so immediately recognisable? Well, typography has a lot to do with it.
