RETHINK THE FOOD LABEL

1. Renee Walker:

Walker’s design is dramatic, intriguing and holds great promise. I liked being able to see the visual breakdown of foods, although I wonder how her design would work with more complicated products, like Lucky Charms, say, or a power bar. Even so, it’s a step in the right direction. What I’d like to see next is some sort of color coding for the food groups and some attempt to show the degree of processing of various foods. Eating doesn’t have to be complicated; figuring out what’s in your food shouldn’t be either.
 
2. Bradley Mu:

Mu’s hack of the traditional label is easy to grasp and adds a new set of valuable metrics. I like his attempt and handling of ingredients but found it slightly confusing. He’ll need a key to make this clearer. Still, he gets extra points for addressing the glycemic index, a number that’s now relevant for at least 30 percent of America’s adult population.

3. Frankling Gaw

This one is perhaps the most plausible. It’s familiar, yet more informative than the current label. I like the visualization of serving size, and percent daily value. Both offer a quick, tangible reference for the consumer. One thing I’d like to see included is total calories per package, since most Americans aren’t counting out fifteen tortilla chips before put down the bag.

1. Joey Brunelle:

I think Joey’s design works because it’s realistic for a consumer to read and benefit from. It uses common iconography, like the red/green/yellow (stoplight) which I saw in a few designs, in an incredibly simple way. It’s one of the few designs that works at a glance.

2. Dylan Brown:

While I find Dylan’s aesthetic styling to be unrealistic, I think his ideas are great. Listing calories in terms of exercise (instead of percentage of daily intake) makes a lot more sense, and is overall closer to being accurate for each individual. I also like the separation of the processed from true ingredients, and the food score.

3. Renee Walker:

I don’t exactly understand how Renee’s attractive but seemingly impractical large, colored boxes would work in terms of fitting on the side of a box or on a tiny bar, but I think the highlighting of certain ingredients works, and the overall design is quite pleasing.

1. Joey Brunelle:

Good: Graphic representation of %DV; Size of calories: snack vs. meal; Stoplight colors; Transfat amount; Nutrients added vs. nutrients removed; What’s been added vs. what’s been removed; No subjective assessment or grade. Bad: No ingredients list; No ecofootprint

2. Franklin Gaw

Good: Serving size, and servings per container %DV; Transfat info; Sugar info, but doesn’t have a DRI; Dietary fiber; Amounts and bar graphs of nutrients; Ingredients list; Food allergy info. Bad: No omega-3 fat data; Fiber is not broken down into endogenous vs. added.

3. Nick Huard

Good: Serving size, and servings per package; Processing, locality, and sustainability indices; Fat breakdown, including transfats and omega-3’s %DV; Unprocessed fiber; Added sugar and sodium. Bad: No info on how health metrics assessed; No ingredients list.

4. Dylan Brown (HM)

Good: Easy to read; Scale of health assessment %DV; Eco footprint; Fiber; Servings per container; Stoplight colors. Bad: Scale is subjective; No serving size; No explanation of what endogenous vs. what’s added; No ingredients list.

1. Bradley Mu

(+) This is a very graphical solution, which stood out from the others because it is motivated by an overall goal to incentivize food producers to change their products, so their food labels would contain more “unlocked” icons, or more “green” (thus “good”) ingredients. Instead of using gaming as a visual metaphor, it is used as an incentive to encourage the redesign of food products, and not only of food labels. The labels show a consistent design reasoning, and the bar graphs are informative and minimalistic, while not making up the majority of allocated space. The color coding is consistent, simple and meaningful.
(-) I had to read the explanation to understand what the bold-style font means in the ingredient list (while the green color code was more evident). I interpreted this differently than what was meant, but it would be interesting to test how people in general provide meaning to visual treatment of text. More particularly, hough I appreciate the idea of coding the ingredient list in a meaningful way, I believe people are not able to interpret multiple mappings (i.e. of color, and bold style, and italics style) in an intuitive or meaningful way. The infographic illustrations seem consistent, though could benefit from some small fine-tuning, such as the addition of an explicit 2000 tick at the “calories” circular graph (and what would happen if a food product had more than 2000cal? or more than 100% fat in comparison to the ideal daily intake?). Without the explicit explanation, the ‘red light’ color coding was unclear to me at first. The “easy to read” table/grid layout might need some optimization: I first read this layout as “Vitamin A: 8g” and kept looking for a Protein value… The Glycemic Index graph would need some contextualization: it is unclear why it looks different from the other bar graphs, and why its title is treated as important as the title “one serving”.

2. Walker Renee

(+) This is another visual-centric approach to redesigning the food label. It contains an original idea to use a treemap to denote the ingredients, which by itself acts as an attractive though still informative eye-catcher. It follows a contemporary graphic design style, although that might be seen as a negative by some, as a food label should be able to withstand the test of time. The label also contains a form of interpretative context, by way of a thumbs ‘up’ or ‘down’ iconography. The color mapping seems more motivated by style rather than meaning.
(-) The ingredient treemap graph at the top would be ideal to show the ingredients as an hierarchical dataset. For example, the ‘additives’ rectangle could be further subdivided, or the ‘frozen vegetables’ rectangle could be showing the relative amounts of ‘broccoli’ or ‘peas’ that are actually present in the package. In that sense, the label also does not contain detailed ingredient information (e.g. knowing the exact ‘additives’ might be important for some customers), and might become problematic for products with many ingredients. The graphic design highly emphasizes the percentage values of nutrients (by using a bold, large font in a centered location), though they only make sense in combination with the nutrient labels, which are a bit squeezed between the bar graphs and require quite some effort to recognize and read. I am also unsure what the 2-colored bar graphs mean: for instance, the apple shows 17% fiber, though part of the bar is black, and part of the bar is red. Some percentage values are colored, although the reasoning for this is not immediately evident: sometimes it seems to highlight an unhealthy value, sometimes it denotes a healthy fact. The bar graph / nutrient fact list contains different elements for each product (and is sorted by a “proportionate representation of ingredients” according to the accompanying description), which might confuse people who like to quickly compare values from different products. If I understand correctly, nutrient facts would thus be listed at different positions on each product, or even not be present at all. However, in many ways, showing an ingredient is *not* present is important as well!

3. Tommy McCall

(+) This label follows a highly stylized approach, which seems influenced by the current popularity of infographic illustrations. Many detailed facts are made available through a visual format. As a visualization addict, I felt this label should be included in my shortlist, as I believe in the power of visualization to summarize information in an intuitive way. However, some rethinking and fine-tuning of this design would still be highly beneficial.
(-) Some of the graphs are difficult to understand, let alone interpret. The “serving equivalent” pie chart (?) seems to attempt to compare a meal, with a dish, with a nibble. From the data it contains I understand that fifteen nibbles equals one dish, and four dishes equals one meal, though this does not correspond to what is shown in the accompanying graph (i.e. in terms of surface area). The dissection of the hamburger in its parts is intuitive, though is still confusing (e.g. the burger / 235 calories connects a hollow circle with a filled one, and these mapping carry a meaning). How this technique would work with less illustrative food products is unclear. The illustration also only focuses on calories and a binary value (whole versus refined food), which seems a missed opportunity for such a refined and detailed representation. I cannot understand the “Total amount per serving” graph, where I am guessing the radius corresponds to % daily value and the angle is mapped by the weight (or random)? What can I learn from this? I actually would assume the black outlined circle is an ‘ideal’ value that I would need to reach, but this is contrary to the facts. The repeated use of filled versus empty circles to denote ‘whole’ versus ‘refined’ food and ‘naturally’ versus ‘processed’ food would be confusing to those people that quickly scan the label and miss the difference in mapping. These terms could also be better aligned.

1. Dylan Brown:

I like the minimalist approach. Clear lettering, clear grades with added color-coding, and no fancy, space-taking graphs for people to puzzle over. Nothing extraneous about growing practices, GMOs and whether the workers at the package manufacturer belonged to a union!—that information belongs elsewhere. If anything, this label could convey somewhat more information, such as serving sizes. Too bad the food industry would never allow “F” ratings to go on their labels. I’d dispense with the eight squares at the top and just say “8 servings per package.” Details: replace sugars with added sugars; replace fat with saturated fat. I’m skeptical “distance traveled” could be easily calculated for many foods…or enforceable.

2. Josh Jeffrey:

I like the clear typography and big print. The “health-o-meter” is clever, though it should be supplemented with a numerical score, a la NuVal. And the high–low indicator for several key nutrients also is clever. The “What’s Good” and “What’s Bad” section includes lucid explanations. Too bad the food industry would never allow “What’s Bad” to go on their labels. Details:The %DVs are all incorrect, saturated fat should list the %DV, and total sugars should be replaced with added sugars.

3. Renee Walker:

There’s a lot I don’t like about this label: serving sizes should use words (and possibly omit the illustration to save space); the symbols to the left of the percentages are unclear; the graph takes up a lot of space and probably would not be understood by the very people whom you’d like to use the label; “amount of ingredients” (I assume that means “number of ingredients”) is pretty meaningless (good chefs use many ingredients; it’s not the number, but their identity that matters); the nutrients are not consistent from food to food; should use added sugars instead of total sugars; and saturated fat should be indicated instead of total fat. So what’s there left to like? I like the bold, colorful rectangles showing how much of which ingredients are in the food. (Of course, just listing percentages in the ingredient label would save a huge amount of space, but this graphic is a lot more attractive and easier to understand.)