Can You Believe It? Some Interesting Typography Appears in a Fast Food (KFC) Ad!

I’ve seen these KFC Snackers commercials flash across the screen for some time now, but recently it occured to me that KFC, with this series, is actually (surprise!) doing something interesting with their typography. While most fast food commercials make their type as cheesey (pun), cheap and flavorless as their own food, someone here has obviously been able to sweet-talk KFC’s marketing masters into letting them do something interesting.

The typeface here is a bold, white, sans-serif presented in (mostly) all caps. It has been distressed to the point of almost looking hand-drawn: there are faded spots in the letters and many of the straight edges have been smudged or blurred to goopy, rounded shapes. Additionally, the opacity has been lowered, letting the background images bleed slightly through the letters.

In the first image (if you can ignore the crappy attempt at subliminal advertising with the small image of a dollar bill transposed over the lettuce), the 99 takes center stage, and the titling wraps snugly around the sandwich. The second image brings in a nice touch of lower case. In this image, the lowercase “a” and the “fl” are quite interesting. I also like the cent sign and the placement of the “ea.” under it. In the third image, notice how the designer actually uses the type to dance with the image: the man on the stairs leans left while the type leans right (due to the right justification), forming a nice space shape.

One thing the designer didn’t do is push what I call placebo branding by insisting that “KFC” be enormous, or presented in the KFC logo style of typography. Or (ugh), placing the KFC logo somewhere in the image. Instead, the real message here, “Our food is dirt cheap,” gets the proper attention. Plus, big bold numbers in sans-serif are cool, as you can see.