Style combination · Contrasts

Egyptian Cigarette Packaging × Plain Tobacco Packaging

Its regulatory opposite: plain packs strip out every crest, border and vignette this style uses to sell, a sharp foil for any critique of tobacco branding.

From the research on Egyptian Cigarette Packaging (Cairo Tobacco Houses)

Mix them and make something Egyptian Cigarette Packaging Plain Tobacco Packaging

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Egyptian Cigarette Packaging, their arrangement from Plain Tobacco Packaging, the finish from Egyptian Cigarette Packaging. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Egyptian Cigarette Packaging (Cairo Tobacco Houses) Plain Tobacco Packaging

Type from Egyptian Cigarette Packaging: All caps
Eclectic mixing
Colour from Plain Tobacco Packaging: Earth & mineral
Flat fields
Form from Egyptian Cigarette Packaging: Borders & frames
Emblems & badges

Plain Tobacco Packaging avoids emblems & badges: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
Composition from Plain Tobacco Packaging: Central symmetry
Single focal point
Surface from Egyptian Cigarette Packaging: Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Egyptian Cigarette Packaging

Public

Bungee Shade, standing in for Shaded, outlined and spurred serif capitals for the maker's name ('M. MELACHRINO & Co.')

Text · Plain Tobacco Packaging

A packaging language written into law to strip tobacco of persuasion. Since Australia's Tobacco Plain Packaging Act 2011 (all retail packs from 1 December 2012), logos, brand colours, imagery and embossing are banned: every pack is a rigid, matt rectangle in Pantone 448C 'drab dark brown', chosen in consumer testing as the least appealing colour. Clinical photographs of disease under bold Helvetica capitals fill most of the front and back, and the brand survives as one small centred line of grey sans-serif, with the variant name on a smaller line below. More than twenty countries followed.

Inter; Plain Tobacco Packaging used Lucida Sans (Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes) and Helvetica (Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann, 1957)

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Plain Tobacco Packaging, with a counter-accent from Egyptian Cigarette Packaging. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Egyptian Cigarette Packaging (Cairo Tobacco Houses) Plain Tobacco Packaging

#111111 ground · 36%
#ffffff ink · 14%
#ffd100 accent · 18%
#c8322a accent · 14%
#c9a23f accent · 10%
#4a412a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #111111;
  --ink: #ffffff;
  --accent-1: #ffd100;
  --accent-2: #c8322a;
  --accent-3: #c9a23f;
  --accent-4: #4a412a;
  --font-display: "Bungee Shade", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Egyptian Cigarette Packaging (Cairo Tobacco Houses): These boxes sold an Orientalist fantasy of Egypt to Western smokers: the turbaned pipe smoker and the jewelled odalisque are stereotypes, and pharaonic gods and statues were turned into trade marks, so do not reuse them as neutral 'Egyptian' decoration or as a picture of Egyptian life. The crescent and star (an Ottoman and Egyptian state emblem, now widely read as a sign of Islam) and the Arabic inscriptions are state and religious signs, not ornament: do not scatter them or fake Arabic lettering as exotic texture. Tobacco branding is now restricted by advertising bans and plain-packaging laws in many countries, so do not use the style to make real cigarette packs look attractive, and Camel is a live trade mark: draw new marks rather than copying any brand's crest or name.

Plain Tobacco Packaging: Graphic health warnings show real disease and are official public-health instruments; WHO's warning database lists the Australian Government as the owner of its warning images, which it may license to other countries free of charge. Use the shock imagery only for genuine health communication, never as decoration or as a parody that could mislead about a product's risks, and check the terms before reproducing a country's actual warning photographs or mandated layouts. Respect the dignity of the people pictured, never generate imagery that could pass for an official warning, and do not turn the drab-pack look into anti-brand styling for tobacco, vaping or nicotine products, which would make a tool against persuasion persuasive again.