Project Overview

Over the past two years, Cheetos has undergone a rebranding journey for the Mexican market. It began with the Design Team completely redesigning Cheetos packaging, and creating a new Visual Identity that would help the brand to communicate across a variety of touchpoints.

Organisation

PepsiCo Design & Innovation

  

Project Brief

The team conceptualized a host of dynamic brand assets that would continue the inherent fun of the brand, and ensure it remained as irreverent and playful as Chester Cheetah himself.

Typography is a key element for building brand recognition, so we decided to develop a new, dynamic typography based on three different moments of fun people experience when snacking: expectation, enjoyment, and reward.

Project Innovation/Need

With these concepts in mind, we teamed up with a partner agency who shared our vision to create a customized font that would convey the personality of Cheetos through every appearance of the text in a variety of communication formats. Together we built a display typeface, designed to be used for headlines and high impact messages, that could easily adapt to any touchpoint as needed.

Design Challenge

In creating these typographic forms, we were inspired by the attributes of the actual Cheetos products themselves. So, we included a variety of light, condensed, rounded, irregular and curvy traits. It was important that this typography could adapt across all different forms of expression, while following the Cheetos ‘moments of fun’ concept. We divided the typeface into three stylistic variants: normal, curvy and mischievous. These three distinct type styles can easily be used separately or in mixed layouts to create more interesting and flexible typographic arrangements.

We also built this flexible typeface to work in very different situations, from animated sequences to 3D renders and more. Leaving no detail unconsidered, it even has a customized emoji set that adds entertainment and modernity to the brand, as well as personalized icons for the most important social networks, and text balloons that can be activated directly from the keyboard.

Effectiveness

Ultimately with this new typeface, we strengthened the ability for Cheetos to build brand recognition, and turn everything it touches into a fun and memorable experience.