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Fries Drive You in a New Direction
Original Ad
New Ad
This fun, minimalist ad campaign displays McDonald’s fries that guide you as if by GPS, telling you where to go, probably to find your nearest McDonald’s. This ad campaign was the brainchild of TBWA, an advertising company, on behalf of McDonald’s. This particular campaign was for French McDonald’s, coming from the team at the Paris branch of TBWA. I got the image of this ad from this website: https://www.lbbonline.com/news/mcdonalds-shows-the-way-with-minimalist-french-fries-directional-campaign
Original Ad Reverse Engineer
Proximity
The text that coincides with the direction the fries are guiding is on the left side of the ad, where the fries go off the edge. It says “turn left” to describe what the fries are doing, so it needs to be near the fries on the left side to establish that relationship.
Alignment
All the fries are aligned with even spacing between one another, and the box they come from is center-aligned on the page. The text isn’t constrained by typical alignment. Instead both lines are offset from each other, but it is done in a way that looks obviously intentional.
Repetition
Out of the box come seven fries, all the same width, and spaced apart the same distance, giving the design a very uniform look. Apart from the background, the most dominant color is yellow due to its repetition in the fries, the text, and the logo.
Contrast
The pink of the background, the red of the box, and the yellow of the fries, logo, and text all stand apart from one another. The contrast is especially apparent in the lines made by the fries. There is enough contrast between the pink and yellow that each fry/line is distinguishable from the others.
Color
The primary colors in the ad are decided by McDonald’s signature yellow and red. The fries happen to perfectly match this, and they use yellow for the text because t is the color of the focus of the ad, which is the fries.
Typography
To fit with the minimalist design, the ad makes use of a simple sans serif font for its text. The lines made by the fries have no decoration, which is reflected in the simple font that uses simple lines without employing serifs or shifting line thickness.
New Ad Reverse Engineer
Proximity
The text that coincides with the direction the fries are guiding is close to the curve where the fries veer to the right slightly. It says “merge right” to describe what the fries are doing, so it needs to be near the fries’ curve to establish that relationship.
Alignment
Just like in the original, all the fries are aligned with even spacing between one another, and the box they come from is center-aligned on the page. The text isn’t constrained by typical alignment. Instead both lines are offset from each other, but it is done in a way that looks obviously intentional.
Repetition
Out of the box come seven fries, all the same width, and spaced apart the same distance, giving the design a very uniform look. Apart from the background, the most dominant color is yellow due to its repetition in the fries, the text, and the logo.
Contrast
The green of the background, the red of the box, and the yellow of the fries, logo, and text all stand apart from one another. The contrast is especially apparent in the lines made by the fries. There is enough contrast between the green and yellow that each fry/line is distinguishable from the others.
Color
The primary colors in the ad are decided by McDonald’s signature yellow and red. The fries happen to perfectly match this, and I used yellow for the text because it is the color of the focus of the ad, which is the fries.
Typography
To fit with the minimalist design, the ad makes use of a simple sans serif font for its text. The lines made by the fries have no decoration, which is reflected in the simple font that uses simple lines without employing serifs or shifting line thickness. To emulate the original font, I found a sans serif font called Alternate Gothic ATF, due to its similar letter shape and matching square-shaped period.
In conclusion, the new ad I made fits the original ad campaign because it contains the same minimalist feel. It has matching lines and text that help the “fries” guide the audience. I recreated the fry box to match the original, and properly aligned it at the center. I used a basic light color as the background, and matched the sans serif font as best I could, all in all generating an ad that works in the same campaign as the original.
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The Design Behind an Ad for Fries
The advertisement above was designed by McDonald’s, a very popular international fast food chain. This image was taken from a Google image search, but it originally was a print ad, and the image was sourced from a page made by someone who did there own breakdown of the ad, found here: https://7aqua.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/mcdonalds-print-ad-deconstructing-a-print-ad/
Repetition
This ad features a few repetitions of the McDonald’s logo, which ensures the audience knows what is being advertised, as the Golden Arches are a well-known symbol over decades of use. The ad also features the same white, all-lowercase font throughout.
Proximity
This ad vertically pairs each piece of text with the picture below it as the audience reads across the ad from left to right. This helps the audience to recognize the relationship between the image and the time period stated by the text, and that they form a timeline.
Alignment
The text and images in the main body of the ad are also properly aligned with one another. The text is on the same line all the way across the ad, and each image is center-aligned on its respective piece of text.
Contrast
With the ad being primarily red, the designer was able to bring the audience’s attention to anything that isn’t red, like the brown potato or the yellow fries. It also helps the white text to pop out and be easily read.
Color
The colors red, gold/yellow, and white are iconic to McDonald’s, so they use these colors due to the strong association with the chain. They also make good use of shades of red to separate the red boxes of fries from the red background so they don’t blend in perfectly and get missed.
Altogether, McDonald’s does a good job of using the principles of design to attract the audience’s attention to what they are trying to convey. The ad is well-designed and all the more effective because of it.
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