Cheetos New Typeface | 2022

Designer: PepsiCo Design & Innovation, PepsiCo, New York, New York, USA
Manufacturer: PepsiCo, New York, New York, USA

Over the past two years, Cheetos has undergone a rebranding journey for the Mexican market. It began with the Design Team completely redesigning Cheetos packaging, and creating a new Visual Identity that would help the brand to communicate across a variety of touchpoints. The team conceptualized a host of dynamic brand assets that would continue the inherent fun of the brand, and ensure it remained as irreverent and playful as Chester Cheetah himself.

Typography is a key element for building brand recognition, so the design team decided to develop a new, dynamic typography based on three different moments of fun people experience when snacking: expectation, enjoyment, and reward. With these concepts in mind, they teamed up with a partner agency that shared our vision to create a customized font that would convey the personality of Cheetos through every appearance of the text in a variety of communication formats. Together they built a display typeface, designed to be used for headlines and high-impact messages, that could easily adapt to any touchpoint as needed.

In creating these typographic forms, the team was inspired by the attributes of the actual Cheetos products themselves. So, they included a variety of light, condensed, rounded, irregular, and curvy traits. It was important that this typography could adapt across all different forms of expression while following the Cheetos ‘moments of fun’ concept. They divided the typeface into three stylistic variants: normal, curvy, and mischievous. These three distinct type styles can easily be used separately or in mixed layouts to create more interesting and flexible typographic arrangements.

The design team also built this flexible typeface to work in very different situations, from animated sequences to 3D renders and more. Leaving no detail unconsidered, it even has a customized emoji set that adds entertainment and modernity to the brand, as well as personalized icons for the most important social networks, and text balloons that can be activated directly from the keyboard. Ultimately with this new typeface, they strengthened the ability for Cheetos to build brand recognition, and turn everything it touches into a fun and memorable experience.