As the spiritual home of both branding and the supermarket (‘the natural habitat of the package’), it’s been a lot of fun to check out the state of play in American packaging design.
Design in general tends to reflect both cultural norms and emerging trends, but the balance varies markedly across product categories. For packaged goods, as in all recession-scarred Western economies there’s a generous helping of nostalgia in evidence, but there’s also more stripped-back or funky modernism than I was expecting.
Other globally trending topics such as ‘authentic’ brands and ‘natural science’ are clearly visible too. Some of the design executions would be perfectly at home in most of the developed world whilst some, like the portion sizes in The Cheesecake Factory, could only be American…