Tiny, tiny print on packaging. Can someone who does this explain?
-
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
Doesn't it have to be in French and English as well?
-
I'm deeply depressed and so totally not surprised. Thank you so much for the great answer and insight. It's very cool to be able to throw out a question like that and get an insider's view.
cheers Chris Maunder
Do what the "weed" people do: a "2-ply" label that peels apart with the pre-printed instructions, etc. inside. Two sides versus part of one face.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
-
Doesn't it have to be in French and English as well?
That's nothing; in the EU it has to be in all the Official Languages, which leads to "quick start" booklets as thick as novels. :omg:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
-
It's point number one. They don't want you to know what's in the product. It's not just for bread and soy sauce. There's also a lot of tricks they play. Like for instance, the FDA allows the package to say "zero trans fat" if there's less than 0.5 grams per serving. With a small serving size that can still add up despite the package saying zero when it's clearly not. It's not by accident. How it's made and if it could kill you or not isn't "cool". What's cool is logos and if it was shown on TV with chicks or something.
Jeremy Falcon
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
They don't want you to know what's in the product.
That is an essential point. They use all sorts of strange names, both to make it sound fancy, like declaring the contents of 'aqua' or chemical names filling two lines, and when you look it up, it really is a super-fancy(?) way of identifying some everyday substance. Or they use chemical names in inventive ways to hide ingredients that the customer might find undesirable, such as not saying 'salt', but specifying chloride and natrium content separately. Except that in Norwegian, 'natrium' is name of sodium, so here, they write it as chloride and sodium, hoping that we will not realize that they are talking about NaCl, salt. And then there are the ads declaring, say, "Pepsodent toothpaste with irium". When they were pressed about this 'irium', they had to admit that it was their name for water. They had always been careful to never claim to be the only ones with irium, and they had never claimed it to have particular positive effects (that could not be ascribed to water). Yet lots of customers chose the toothpaste that contained irium.
-
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
Probably all of the above. It's like TV advertising in the UK where by law the small print (T&C's) have to be included, so they are gabbled in a voice over as quickly as possible, so they are as hard as possible to comprehend. Just shows how deceitful the advertising industry and their customers are.
-
They're all young developers with good eye sight. As you get older the fonts needed goes from small to nana-vision...
A Fine is a Tax for doing something wrong A Tax is a Fine for doing something good.
When I was young I didn't understand why my Dad couldn't read stuff I had no trouble with. I knew old people's eyesight was poorer, but not my Dad, surely? Now, many decades later, I get it! It is easy for businesses to set standards for their packaging. That they obviously don't, or don't bother to enforce them, suggests that they just don't care. Well now, there's a surprise!
-
It's No. 5. Definitely. :) Seriously, I think that Sander's explanation is probably close to the mark. Certain countries mandate a minimal point size for ingredients, the "small print" on contracts, etc. In some of them, a contract that is printed in too-small font can even be invalidated on that basis!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
Which countries are they?
-
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
-
As a matter of fact, I've made labels for packagings in the meat industry. Your #2 is pretty close to the mark. Mostly, the software that creates labels isn't exactly high-tech, so scaling is not something it does. The size of labels is restrained by the printers a company has, those printers aren't easily replaced because you'd have to change all labels too, which can easily grow into the hundreds (different labels for different products, countries, customers, etc.). Labels are usually too small for all the data that producers are now legally obliged to print. There's a big chance your label is unreadably small because the Arab translation of the text is a bit longer and the label has to accommodate both. And sometimes it's just that font size 8 is too big, but font size 7 is too small (or there is no 7 and you have to fall back to 6), and if those are your option you go for the size that fits and call it a day! BarTender is popular label printing and design software and this is what it looks like: BarTender[^]
Chris Maunder wrote:
No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking
There's usually not really any design phase. Some IT guy just makes a label and drags and resizes until it fits. The people who print the labels and put them on the packaging are not paid nearly enough to care!
Chris Maunder wrote:
To save time and money they did zero usability testing
I've never heard of a label being usability tested :laugh: They print the label once to check if all necessary data is on it (read, they can't be sued) and continue with more important business. Companies don't make those labels for you, they make them so you can see their logo and they don't get fined by their government.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LI
Well now, funny how they can arrange all the other printing on the packaging to be larger than life to grab your attention, but somehow the stuff they'd rather you didn't pay attention to has to be, for a variety of apparently insurmountable reasons, almost too tiny to read!
-
Do what the "weed" people do: a "2-ply" label that peels apart with the pre-printed instructions, etc. inside. Two sides versus part of one face.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
Gerry Schmitz wrote:
the "weed" people
At first I thought you were referring to me because I'm Dutch :laugh: For the record, I never smoked weed, but have had plenty of opportunity.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
-
Which countries are they?
In Israel, there is a minimum size allowed for "small print". I'm sure it's not the only country on the globe with this requirement.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
-
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
-
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
I would guess number one. Many medical TV ads, after saying how great their product is, often have a disclaimer (how it may in fact harm you) in small low contrast fonts which are on screen for only a few seconds. I am 80 years old, still writing apps (well sort of), and small font size is always an issue for me. Bring back punched cards!!
73
-
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
Chris, they're age-ist, twentysomething arsehats who will get their comeuppance when they hit their 40's. In my experience (I'm 62), that's your only hope. Nobody gives a crap about accessibility issues for anyone over the age of 25.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
So, I liked #3 as a great rationalization, and I know Sander’s answer is closest to the truth, but I would have bet that the store manager assigned the task to whomever was working in the bakery - without regard to whether they had any experience at all with computers, labels, fonts, or printing. That person, after finally getting something to print on the actual label, said “Good enough!” :)
Time is the differentiation of eternity devised by man to measure the passage of human events. - Manly P. Hall Mark Just another cog in the wheel
-
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
-
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
I wrote label printing software in the late 90s/early 2000s for hardware-type stores, streaming data from the computer's COM port to an RS232 port on the printer. The few label printers we developed for (I remember SATO printers) had "built in" support for specific font types and sizes. If you used any font/size combination not built in then the printer treated it as a graphic rather than text. This slowed the printing down considerably - from 20 or 30 labels per second to 1 label per second. The font sizes supported were strange - if you went up one size it effectively doubled the printed size. To figure out the finished label, you get the max size that would ever be printed per field and play a long game of massaging the various fields' fonts/sizes to get things looking ok. Another problem is the DIP switches on the printer. If not set right it can affect the printing. I'm not saying the food packaging label designers put a lot of thought in, but there might be legitimate reasons. Someone mentioned Bartender software - I used that as well during the discovery phase, but we ditched it for the printing speed of using the built-in fonts.
Mike
-
I wrote label printing software in the late 90s/early 2000s for hardware-type stores, streaming data from the computer's COM port to an RS232 port on the printer. The few label printers we developed for (I remember SATO printers) had "built in" support for specific font types and sizes. If you used any font/size combination not built in then the printer treated it as a graphic rather than text. This slowed the printing down considerably - from 20 or 30 labels per second to 1 label per second. The font sizes supported were strange - if you went up one size it effectively doubled the printed size. To figure out the finished label, you get the max size that would ever be printed per field and play a long game of massaging the various fields' fonts/sizes to get things looking ok. Another problem is the DIP switches on the printer. If not set right it can affect the printing. I'm not saying the food packaging label designers put a lot of thought in, but there might be legitimate reasons. Someone mentioned Bartender software - I used that as well during the discovery phase, but we ditched it for the printing speed of using the built-in fonts.
Mike
My very first job was writing a printer driver for geo plots on a state-of-the-art printer that used actual pens for printing (as in, it would pick a pen from the rack of pens, draw in that colour, put the pen back. It was mesmerising). I remember spending a lot of time working on getting the font sizes right. I guess this is what's doing my head in: working out how to measure the width of a piece of text you are about to print is a task that needs to be done once per system. Providing the means to change fonts seems to be definitely already built in (I see different font weights and size in this micro-text). For some reason putting the two together just seems...to hard?
cheers Chris Maunder
-
Is there anyone here who works on systems that print food labels. The specific ones I'm thinking about are small sachets of soy sauce, or the labels printed for in-store, freshly baked bread. The labels that are 90% whitespace with 2pt high text that you almost need a microscope to read. The trend of unreadably-tiny-font-on-an-area-that-could-accomodate-a-billboard seems to have been increasing in the past few years and I would love an actual reason for it. My guesses 1. They don't actually want you to read the labels. They package the raisin bread with the whole grain bread in the same exact package, label, tie, everything, with the only difference being the teeny tiny words that allow you distinguish, in the mood lighting of the bread department, what it actually is. It makes shifting unwanted inventory easier
2. They have software that can't scale a font to make it fit the space, and also have to cater to labels that are potentially 1024 characters long, so they take space / # chars = microscopic font. Problem solved!
3. Someone in accounting worked out that based on font size, total chars printed, total number of labels, and the cost of ink, they would save $5.47 each year if they printed in 2pt font size.
4. No one involved from label design to product creation to printing to stocking has ever actually tried purchasing a product printed like this in an actual store. To save time and money they did zero usability testing
5. They are simply evil. Can anyone shed some light here?cheers Chris Maunder
Not quite the explanation here, but what I know ... We have auto bagging machines here at the building I work in. The bags are printed with all the art work in a generic format, and come on a roll of 5000. When we designed the bag artwork, we left ourselves a 2" by 4" space to print the product name, specs, UPC Barcode, customer logo, etc. As time passed, we had to print more legal stuff in the print area, and the printing got smaller for some text, and increased the size of the barcode, so it scans on every barcode scanner you can imagine. So these auto baggers, feed a bag into the plenum, blow air into the bag to open it, and dump product into it by weight, and seal the bag, then tear and dump into a bin. We can't make the print area larger, because were limited by the heat thermal transfer head size that prints the information. We can't buy a larger one, because the ones we have match the entire system, where we use RS232 to download the data to the thermal heat thermal transfer print head. To print larger, we would have to buy all brand new equipment, which is not cost effective. I know with major bread brands, they can afford to have a custom bag printed for each bread type, because they only offer White and Wheat. They just auto bag, and print the factory number, batch number, UPC Barcode, and expiration date in a specified area. I first saw tiny print 30 years ago coming from Asia, with products such as Sony, Toshiba, etc, because they tried to print in 5 different languages on the same sheet of paper designed for a single market place. But now they can consolidate that one product, and ship it to many market places, such as the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe. Hope that helps ...
If it ain't broke don't fix it Discover my world at jkirkerx.com
-
Not quite the explanation here, but what I know ... We have auto bagging machines here at the building I work in. The bags are printed with all the art work in a generic format, and come on a roll of 5000. When we designed the bag artwork, we left ourselves a 2" by 4" space to print the product name, specs, UPC Barcode, customer logo, etc. As time passed, we had to print more legal stuff in the print area, and the printing got smaller for some text, and increased the size of the barcode, so it scans on every barcode scanner you can imagine. So these auto baggers, feed a bag into the plenum, blow air into the bag to open it, and dump product into it by weight, and seal the bag, then tear and dump into a bin. We can't make the print area larger, because were limited by the heat thermal transfer head size that prints the information. We can't buy a larger one, because the ones we have match the entire system, where we use RS232 to download the data to the thermal heat thermal transfer print head. To print larger, we would have to buy all brand new equipment, which is not cost effective. I know with major bread brands, they can afford to have a custom bag printed for each bread type, because they only offer White and Wheat. They just auto bag, and print the factory number, batch number, UPC Barcode, and expiration date in a specified area. I first saw tiny print 30 years ago coming from Asia, with products such as Sony, Toshiba, etc, because they tried to print in 5 different languages on the same sheet of paper designed for a single market place. But now they can consolidate that one product, and ship it to many market places, such as the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe. Hope that helps ...
If it ain't broke don't fix it Discover my world at jkirkerx.com
