A large part of the McDonald's brand message is conveyed by the packaging of its food. Responding to growing environmental awareness, the company has introduced new packaging across 117 countries. It is not only made of recycled and recyclable materials, but also conveys the quality of the ingredients. This attitude of open and honest information and graphics, plus the use of raw ingredient imagery, has helped McDonald's change the perceptions of its customers.

The new packaging was created by Birmingham-based design agency Boxer. They worked closely with Bruno Maag and the Dalton Maag design team to develop this eye-catching, single style, display font for use on all of the client’s new packaging. To enforce the environmental responsibility projected through the recycled packaging, the typeface needed to have a handmade and distressed appearance, as if printed by letterpress. The typeface was to be an ultra-condensed, capitals-only, sans serif, covering Latin, Greek Monotonic, Cyrillic and Arabic, allowing the client to communicate with around 3 billion people across 117 countries.

With the parameters for the typeface already quite clearly defined, we provided only a small number of trials on a small number of characters to determine subtle design details. The chosen design direction has its roots firmly in the typeface designs of the late 19th and early 20th Century. Although the final typeface is distressed to emulate letterpress printing, all of the characters were first designed with clean contours. A specially developed, large pattern allowed the design team to create varying distresses for each character. To further emphasize the randomness of printing, each character was furnished with an alternative that has a different distress pattern. These alternatives are automatically introduced via an OpenType feature to prevent repeated patterns.

The main challenge was to create a matching Arabic design as there are no true ultra condensed examples of Arabic type, and even within calligraphy only a few examples exist. The style and use of the typeface demanded a strongly Kufic style, and any potential legibility issues arising from this treatment were resolved in a creative fashion perfectly acceptable to the modern Arabic reader.