Style combination · Contrasts

Nutri-Score × Plain Tobacco Packaging

Plain packaging strips the brand and hands the face to the state; Nutri-Score leaves the brand intact and adds a small standardised inset in the lower third. Decide whether the public message should replace the design or sit inside it.

From the research on Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label)

Mix them and make something Nutri-Score Plain Tobacco Packaging

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Plain Tobacco Packaging, their arrangement from Nutri-Score, the finish from Nutri-Score. 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.

Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label) Plain Tobacco Packaging

Type from Nutri-Score: Geometric sans
All caps
Colour from Plain Tobacco Packaging: Earth & mineral
Flat fields
Form from Plain Tobacco Packaging: Rectilinear
Naturalistic depiction
Composition from Nutri-Score: Single focal point
Repetition & rhythm
Surface from Nutri-Score: Flat

The type

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

Display · Nutri-Score

Form

Jost, standing in for The logo's own lettering: a heavy geometric sans in capitals for the grey 'NUTRI-SCORE' heading and the white and tinted A–E grades, supplied only as vector outlines in the charter's Illustrator files; the charter's rule is 'Don't change fonts'

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 Nutri-Score. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label) Plain Tobacco Packaging

#111111 ground · 36%
#ffffff ink · 14%
#ffd100 accent · 18%
#ee8100 accent · 14%
#c8102e accent · 10%
#e63e11 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #111111;
  --ink: #ffffff;
  --accent-1: #ffd100;
  --accent-2: #ee8100;
  --accent-3: #c8102e;
  --accent-4: #e63e11;
  --font-display: "Jost", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Nutri-Score (Front-of-Pack Colour-Grade Label): Nutri-Score is an EU trade mark of Santé publique France, licensed to food firms only under its conditions of use, and a grade printed on a pack is a nutrition claim. Do not put the real logo or a convincing imitation on products, mock-ups or generated images in a way that could pass for a genuine score; for fictional or teaching work, change the name or say clearly that the grade is illustrative, and check the current algorithm before showing any real product's letter.

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.