Humanaut recently redesigned the packaging for That's It, a fruit-snack brand built on simplicity. The Fruit Bars only contain two ingredients: fruit... and more fruit. The design challenge was to clean up, modernize and effectively communicate the bars' very simple, all-natural ingredients, all while keeping the design playful enough to appeal to kids and sophisticated enough for adults.
After much market research into snack bars of varying types and other fruit snacks, Humanaut identified a few key design elements that they knew would become the backbone of their redesign. Negative space shows off the ingredients in simple, modular patterns to indicate that the bar isn't simply flavored with the shown fruit, but indeed made up of that one apple and those 20 blueberries. The studio also decided that giving more prominence to the That's It logo was going to be key.
One thing the original packaging did successfully was to use the fruit equation (apple + blueberry). Humanaut did however take the math a step further to identify, right on the front, how much of each ingredient was in each bar. Changing the horizontal orientation of the bar to vertical meant that the individually wrapped bars would read like a statement from top to bottom. "1 Apple + 20 Blueberries in this fruit bar." The equation became central to the design. The design studio worked closely with the client on choosing photography and developing all of the fruit and ingredient patterns that would work their way across boxes, pouches and wrappers.
Ultimately, Humanaut created a striking contrast of delicious ingredients on a white background that leaps off of store shelves. The graphic nature of the design remains playful, like how a child might lay out blueberries before eating them, but still sophisticated enough that an adult would grab one at a Starbucks as a quick snack.
