The best asset in the program was not mine.
The centre of Peppermint Bark was commissioned lettering by Mary Kate McDevitt, and it was the reason the program looked like anything in particular.
There is a standard temptation with an asset like that: absorb it. Redraw it into the house system, regularize its quirks, make it consistent with everything around it. That produces a tidier system and a worse product, and it quietly removes the authorship that made the work worth commissioning.
I directed the system around it instead — a family that could move across tins, boxes, tubes, and bags while the lettering kept the handmade, celebratory quality it arrived with. The brief I set for it at the time was a festive but artisanal packaging system, meant to be evergreen and easily repeatable, and those two words were in tension on purpose: evergreen wants stability, artisanal wants the irregularity that stability tends to sand off.
Repeatability came from naming what was allowed to move.
The lettering carried recognition, so it stayed fixed. Format, scale, composition, supporting graphics, and application were free to change around it.
That is what let the program repeat without every package becoming the same package, and it is the entire decision: identify the element carrying identity, then give everything else explicit permission to adapt to its format.
In 2023 the lettering was shortlisted by Communication Arts for Typography. That is recognition of externally commissioned work produced under my direction, which is why the credit belongs in the case rather than under it.
Lettering by Mary Kate McDevitt · Creative direction by Jin Mi.
