A daunting design challenge
14 September 2010
If you’ve eaten in McDonald’s anytime over the past year or so you’ll have noticed the nutritional information printed on your McLovliness, there to tell you just how bad the food you’re eating is for you. When I first saw this information I struggled to understand what the icons actually meant.
The nutritional information printed on McDonald’s food is part of their global nutrition initiative — a truly daunting design & communication challenge, to be sure:
The company wanted to make nutrition information more accessible and understandable to the average consumer, and determined through extensive research that visual icons representing key food nutrients (protein, for example) were the appropriate course of action. But how does one convey a nutrient in pictures when no established images exist?