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We Want Bread and Irvin, Too
Filed under: X-Rea: Irvin Type Watch Tagged: design, food, Jesse Ewing, Rea Irvin, typography
Hi Emily,Not sure if you’re still doing your X-Rea category, but I’ve got an entry that kind of blew my mind.
See attached picture. In our defense, we had to get white bread to make proper BLTs.
Jesse (and wife Chelsea)
I’d like a BLT right now, actually. Anyway, Gwyneth Dyer, writer for the communications design agency Larsen, has just noted this sliced Rea-lette on her marketing blog, mentioning (thanks!) our slow but steady X-Rea machine. She notes:
I’m wondering if this was a purposeful decision — to align a bakery brand with a sophisticated weekly magazine of literature, current affairs, and humor. Perhaps the brand manager’s thinking went like this: Customer needs to pick up some bread. Customer is overwhelmed by choices on grocery shelf. Customer spots a bread that seems somehow familiar, almost classic, possibly a bit more erudite than the other white breads….She goes on to ask, “What’s your opinion? Is this typeface off limits? Is using it unfairly capitalizing on The New Yorker brand?”
I’d like to toast Jesse, Chelsea, and Dwyer for this excellent find. Pictured is Jesse’s own photograph of the spongy bread; Dyer has a close-up on her site, too. Please email in your own Irvin-esque type sightings, and if you’ve got a photo, screen grab, or scan, all the better!
Who she?
I'm Emily Gordon, reachable at emily@emdashes.com.
I'm an editor at PRINT magazine in New York City. I've worked at The Nation, Newsday, PEN America, and Legal Affairs. I've written for the NY Times Book Review, Salon, The Washington Post, The Village Voice... continued
I welcome tips, questions, and comments about The New Yorker past and present, plus related events, links, typeface sightings, &c. To contact the magazine or send a submission, click here.
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- Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
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- Review: The King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
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- Proposal: A more attractive MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
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- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
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- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
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Comments
Thought I’d swing by and leave a comment. Let me confess: I bought the bread because of the font. (Not sure that was part of the Sara Lee marketing plan.)
I’d love to get a discussion going about the font and its appropriateness. Here’s the link to the MarketingProfs Daily Fix post where readers are already weighing in.
Please join in!
It’s one of the best fonts around - but how’s the bread?
How’s the bread?
Let’s go with the Sara Lee tagline: “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee”
I’m not sure I don’t agree with this!
I’d like to hear some typophiles ID the “Soft & Smooth” face. It sounds more like a description of Charmin than bread, but I do like to put my nose into some smooshy bread, I’ll confess. Soft & Smooth is not, however, very Irvin-like; his lines may have been wavy, but they were definitely edgy.
By the way, sometimes I happen on links that relate to stories I’ve already published (usually via google’s magic carpet), and I just landed on a blogger’s post from 2005 that noted the dinner rolls from this same Sara Lee “smartybread” line. Thanks, Randa Jarrar, retroactively! Also, do you have any of those packages of rolls around in 2008? Seriously, I could use them for something I’m working on. I’ll pay for the shipping!