"McDonald’s legal team faced considerable challenges to ensure that none of the images were already trademarked in another country."
Alphabets solved that problem millennia ago.
McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
61–70 of 164 posts
Re: McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> McDonalds has a clear conflict of interest in the design of these icons for nutrition information. I could understand the point if they'd created McDonald's-specific units (e.g 10 grams of sugar = 1 McVigor). But they're just icons for info that McDonald's makes no effort to hide. Care to elaborate?
Not GP, but using a weight scale for fat and a fuel gauge for carbs, suggests that fat makes you fat while carbs give you energy. This thinking, enshrined in the FDA food pyramid, led to the modern epidemic of obesity and diabetes.
Yes, the weight scale for fat really jumped out to me.
Re: McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
After repeated exposure to these words, customers should eventually grasp their meaning, with or without printed translations next to them.
Yeah -- think about a lot of commonly accepted icons, like for nuclear radiation or biohazards. Or even the weird icons like those for "pause" and "record" on media devices -- these aren't intuitive icons, we've just gotten used to them.
I remember when those (>> for fast fwd, etc) were introduced by Japanese cassette tape companies in the early 70s. They were somewhat controversial!
Re: McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
After repeated exposure to these words, customers should eventually grasp their meaning, with or without printed translations next to them.
Yeah -- think about a lot of commonly accepted icons, like for nuclear radiation or biohazards. Or even the weird icons like those for "pause" and "record" on media devices -- these aren't intuitive icons, we've just gotten used to them.
None of the icons McDonald's chose as their final ones had any meaning to me without a translation chart. How is that different from learning what a word means?
Didn't anyone at McDonald's dare to question the basic idea of this?
Re: McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for all I care Just because you don't care about something doesn't mean it's not worth thinking about, especially when we're talking about international assets.
they're nearly all incomprehensible... there's no way anyone would ever guess most of the meanings
you would never guess the meaning of the letter "a" either, does that make it worthless?
Re: McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
#66This icons don't look like anything to me. Main purpose of icons should be to replace text and McDonald's failed this time.
Re: McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
#67> “We have accomplished our mission: keep the information simple, easy to understand, language-free and top line.” I find this amusing since the first icon is "kcal"... The information is perhaps too simple, as none of these really lets me know what they mean. Without a legend, I wouldn't know what they mean, and if your icons need a legend, then they really aren't doing their job effectively.
> Without a legend, I wouldn't know what they mean, and if your icons need a legend, then they really aren't doing their job effectively. They are presumably trying to establish these icons so that they will eventually become common and recognizable to many people.
> They are presumably trying to establish these icons so that they will eventually become common and recognizable to many people.
That already happens routinely and organically with english words, as anyone who travels internationally knows.
Re: McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
And they accomplished that, by designing symbols that convey no meaning whatsoever.
Symbols, in origin, fundamentally have no meaning.
How true is that? A started as a cow (flip it upside down). That meaning is lost, true, but the Sackcasse (no exit) street sign, or a "T" junction street sign both abstract a physical system.
The Korean alphabet shapes relate to the shape your mouth adopts to make the sound. Many Hanzi have structural association (even ignoring the radicals, which you could consider for the purpose of this discussion analogous to spelling)
And the meaning of the chemical symbols (e.g. "Fe" as the symbol for iron) made a lot of them easier for me to learn, though if you don't grow up with the right set of languages they are somewhat arbitrary.
And, of course, they provide employment for semioticists.
Re: McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
#69> “We have accomplished our mission: keep the information simple, easy to understand, language-free and top line.”
"language-free" by constructing...a language. They even provide a translation dictionary!
Re: McDonald’s Universal Icons for 109 Countries [pdf]
#70Except for calories, I would not be able to understand what means the information on nutrient icons without having the corresponding word next to it.
Ditto. I suspect they could have gotten better international recognition by just using the English words. It would have pissed off the French of course, but that goes in the win column. ;-)
[deleted]