Tofurky Moocho Logotype and Lettering for Packaging Design

A long time client-collaborator – Tofurky – has recently launched both a new product and their new website that feature lettering work by the Bureau. The new product line is called Moocho, which I worked on with Art Director Gary Huck to create a handlettered logo for Tofurky’s new division of dairy-free vegan options. The first series of product are 3 cheesecake flavors. We hit a balance between being bold on package, having a similar personality to other lettered & illustrated elements, being fairly non-gendered and feeling like the word.

Hand lettered / hand drawn word mark for Tofurky brand MOOCHO vegan / dairy free cheesecake.

A technical portion of many packaging projects is fulfilling the legal requirements of packaging. This means that the brand name (Moocho), product name (cheesecake), any specific claims or identifiers (Dairy Free), and flavor (goes in the banner) all have to work together in a specific way in certain size proportions and order. To achieve a balanced look, the product name was lettered in mixed case with a very high x-height, and the claim was also created with a high x-height so it didn’t have to be very large compared to the brand name.

A part of the project was determining the right hierarchy between the parent brand (Tofurky) and the new sub-brand (Moocho). For that reason, Tofurky is represented by a lettered banner instead of the classic black box + logo combination on their other product lines, of which I’ve also created lettering for to differentiate their artisan sausage from the regular old sausages.

The design in general is clean and features the product next to their character illustrations, with color blocking and the brand name being the main on-shelf visual. This is a great way to create a big shelf presence and a recent trend in packaging as new products compete for scannability.

Series of four Moocho Cheesecake packaging boxes (design: Gary Huck) with a hand lettered MOOCHO word mark and product title and flavor.

In addition to the new Moocho brand, Tofurky has also launched their new website that uses various brand lettering I’ve designed as their loading images and visual support throughout their recipe and several about pages. So each time you switch pages, a variety of randomized sayings will pop up…Taste Bud High Five!!!

Partnership Poster for French Paper

Here is another collaboration with WCP Solutions (previously: wrapping paper and an Oregon Duck VS Beaver Rivalry Beer Poster), this time with French Paper Company also a part of the project.

Each year West Coast Paper hosts a paper show, and this year’s theme was “Partnership”. Designers were paired with WCP’s various paper suppliers to create a poster on that mill’s stock in the theme. I worked with French Paper to create this playbill format of circus performers embodying the idea of partnership and working together.

Trio of framed posters, blue ink on pink paper, of french circus performers.

The poster (left in the image above) is printed by Stevens IS on French Paper Pop-Tone “bubble gum” and will be available in a limited run of 100 to attendees of the WCP Paper Show. If you don’t know French Paper, well it’s a mill that has the most fun promotion materials with a very design heavy focus that complement their fantastic colors and various paper collections. The mill is family owned and has been since its inception 6 generations ago in 1871. French is also very focused on sustainability.

Trio of framed posters, blue ink on pink paper, of french circus performers. Left image is three women under a banner (French Paper Company), right image is two women chatting closely.

This project was drawn on the iPad Pro in Adobe Sketch. It’s the biggest project I’ve done so far in this way and while I do use technology to draw, I do it in the most antiquated way possible (using a program that only has 20 layers and fixed paper sizes). The fun part of using the iPad was that a pencil sketching effect could be achieved in a consistent way – on paper this would have required so much erasing.

Trio of framed posters, blue ink on pink paper, of french circus performers. A pyramid of women and two swinging trapeze artists surround an FP monogram for French Paper Company.

Old Brands New – Vaseline / Mister Slippy’s

IpadPro artwork of pencil and pastel drawing - reworking the classic Vaseline jar into a new packaging design.

Practicing some more on my iPadPro with different brushes, this time creating a new name and label for an oldie but goodie – Vaseline. The short development history of this product on Wikipedia is pretty interesting in it’s simplicity. Vaseline is one of many products which brand name has become genericized – instead of Vaseline being a specific brand of petroleum jelly, the name is used to describe all petroleum jelly products (more about all that here).

Tofurky Lettering

After the first round of brand lettering done in 2016 went over well and was used extensively, Tofurky requested another batch of phrases to be illustrated to build out their brand assets even further. While a variety of lettering styles is represented, two main goals of this series was to have some consistent details throughout and have each phrase take up about the same proportion of space so they were easy to use in groups or in similar areas of packaging, POS, and other areas of branding.

Let's Yum This Thing - rallying cry in hand lettered typography for Tofurky.
Quartet of hand lettered phrases: taste bud high five, pickle's plus one, say yum, and up with flavor.
Yum For All hand lettering.
A Bun's Best Friend and Fork Friendly banner hand lettered phrases.
Small hand lettering bits and pieces: chomp chomp chomp, munch munch, takes yum to know yum, best friend of the tastebud, and friendliest food on the plate.

F/Yeah/That

A few years ago I made a short series of lettering pieces called Typographic Terrains, which I enjoyed drawing greatly. They were time consuming to make, though, so I stopped after a small collection had been made. Recently I was looking through some sketches from a Letter PDX event where the prompt was “blackletter”. One F caught my eye, and became something bigger than originally intended. This one was created on my iPad Pro in Adobe Sketch, so it has a slightly different/rougher quality.

patterned lettering F-yeah / F-that combo