Confused about where to start with accessibility? 
Find out from this accessible design critique how accessibility can affect food package design in the marketplace.
Music: https://www.bensound.com
I thought it would be fun to do something a little bit different—and that is to talk about several different package designs from an accessibility perspective—like an accessible design critique. I came up with the idea because a lot of times the packages of food that I’ve bought I’ve identified accessibility issues with them and then on a recent trip to the grocery store I noticed how many more food package designs have accessibility issues as well. So I thought this would be a really interesting topic to discuss here.
#1 La Colombe Draft Latte
The first one is La Colombe, a ready-to-drink draft latte. For what it’s worth, I’m not a coffee drinker, so I am not familiar with this brand.
I looked it up and discovered they had done a redesign not long ago though.
As part of the redesign, they kept the “La” in script and “Colombe” in all caps. They added a bit of lift to “Colombe” as well, adding a hard gold drop shadow.
In both designs, the name is very prominent on the cans and then the words “Coffee Roasters” are below “La Colombe” and pretty small in relation to the rest of the logo. But that’s not an accessibility issue.
You may be surprised to know that there isn’t a minimum font size for accessibility.
It’s still very legible, though, in navy on off-white.
The words “Draft Latte” are arched and appear over “ESTD 1994” and the flavor.
As a general rule, curved text is hard to read when there is a lot of it. But here it’s short—just two words. It’s a nice touch. It gives it kind of a vintage “seal” look.
The bird became smaller in the redesign and the logo much more prominent.
I like how the designers used a different color for each flavor—both around the top of the can and on the front. That makes the cans easily identifiable by color.
But there are two potential accessibility issues with this. As a designer, think about how this could potentially affect sales.
One is contrast. The Caramel and Vanilla flavors have white text on a light gold and light peach background, respectively. People with low vision may have trouble reading this text. There is also some text toward the bottom that is smaller and lighter in color, like a gold.
There is really good contrast on quite a few of the designs, such as the white text on red background for the Triple and the white text on brown for the Mocha.
The second potential accessibility issue is that the colors could present issues for people with color blindness if they’re looking for the color to identify the product on the shelves before reading it. Now, by that I mean, once we’re familiar with how a product looks then we might first look for the color of the package when we’re shopping. People are going to scan shelves in a store or shop online and look for that product. Regardless, they need to be able to spot a product quickly among the sea of other products.
#2 Banza Chickpea Pasta
Banza is a brand I am familiar with, since I’ve been eating gluten free for a little more than a year now. Banza makes chickpea pasta.
Side note: If you aren’t gluten free or don’t eat chickpeas, it probably sounds horrible, but I like it. For what it’s worth, I didn’t see myself ever eating much of chickpeas. I am not a big hummus fan.
But I eat chickpea pasta and I make the best low-oxalate chocolate chip cookies that happen to be made with chickpea flour. Yes, that’s a thing too, and contact me if you want the recipe. You can thank me later.
Banza’s packaging used to have a white background with orange and gold text. They redesigned it to have a bright orange background with their brand name really large in white and other text in red.
Yes, red on orange. It says “Made with chickpeas” in red on orange. It’s almost as if they don’t want you to read that.
Black or another color would have been more legible. The white text stands out so much it’s not like it would compete with that.
I get that some brands don’t want some information to be very prominent, but with such low contrast against the background, the red on orange is barely legible to many people, including people without a visual disability.
But it seems kind of counterintuitive to have large text in almost the same color as the background. They wanted it to be big but not stand out too much.
#3 Starbucks Coconut Milk
While scanning the aisles at the grocery store, I came across the Starbucks coconut milk. I didn’t even know they made that.
Two in particular—strawberry açai and pineapple passionfruit—peaked my interest.
The strawberry açai has a strawberry and red text at the top, then the Starbucks logo, then white text that says “Starbucks® Pink Drink,” along with some other text below it stating the calories per serving and product weight.
The white text doesn’t have sufficient contrast against the light pink background.
The same goes for the pineapple drink. It has white text on a yellow background.
Again, consumers with low vision may have issues reading this text.
They could, however, still identify the drink by the dark green logo, which has plenty of contrast against the pink background, and the text at the top, which does as well. They could also probably identify the strawberry icon and possibly the pineapple icon.
Learn Accessible Design
I hope you liked this accessibility evaluation of these food packages. Let me know what you think and if you want to see more of them.
Fixing contrast issues can have big impact on your designs. I talked about that in the last episode, The Biggest Accessibility Mistake (& How to Avoid It).
If you’re interested in learning more about accessible design, check out my Accessible Branding & Design course. It’s for any kind of designer—logo designers, graphic designers, document designers and web designers. You’ll learn how to create accessible brand color palettes, style guides and accessible designs for infographics, documents and websites. It’s the perfect way to get started in accessibility and it’s all about the visual design. So you don’t have to learn the technical stuff. If you decide you want to get into the more technical accessibility stuff later, you get a discount to take my other courses in website accessibility and InDesign and PDF accessibility.