My immediate reaction is I like the first version of the label much better. As someone else observed, the animals on the first label help to frame your brand name while they partially obscure your name in the second.
Having said that, I have to admit I'm not at all a fan of the presence of the animals on either label. On the first, there is a wide disparity in the attitudes of each animal. The pig looks heavily medicated, the bull extremely fierce, and the chicken’s pose looks like it has a chip on its shoulder. A definite hodgepodge of attitudes there.
The animals on the second label share the same cheerful attitude but strike me as looking more like lovable Saturday morning cartoon characters. They look more at home as mascots on a cereal box. The label’s juxtaposition of the strong, bold colors and font faces against the smiling cartoon-ish characters seem to me to be the result of differing points of view about the design of the original label and that led to a compromise that, like most compromises, made no one happy.
I keep coming up with this central thought that I'd like to run up the flag pole. Just how necessary to the label’s purpose and your brand’s identity are the animals in the first place?
Unless a cartoon animal or animals are going to be an integral part of your brand's name or identity or have been in the past, I believe their inclusion needlessly adds noise and clutter to the label.
The average consumer, by default, is already going to subconsciously equate the use of your BBQ sauce to cuts of pork, beef, and chicken. This makes the use of these cartoon animals (with the requisite dilemmas and debates about the proper postures and expressions to use) completely redundant.
To my mind, leaving the animals off altogether would give you a cleaner, much less noisy space on the label to get your primary message across about what your product is.
White space attracts the viewer’s eye and the mental image I have of
Smokehouse BBQ
in bold colors against the white background (and without the cartoon animals to clutter the image), definitely jumps off the label.
Then again, as Dennis Miller used to say, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.
At any rate, this has been an interesting mental exercise and good luck.
Good luck with your endeavor.
PBP
