Designing custom fonts based on a brand’s logo has become something of a flex for companies like WK Kellogg Co and T.J. Maxx, and it makes sense. Take one of a brand’s best-known assets and turn it into a full-on alphabet to extend it to more places. For its new custom font, Cheetos took a much different approach.
Rather than playing to its brand assets with a cartoonish font based on the Cheetos logo, Other Hand font is an irregular, scribbled font that plays to the brand experience: It imagines a typeface made by designers whose fingers are covered in orange Cheetos dust.
The stunt font is the first “fully designed with the other hand,” Cheetos says on its website, where the font is available to download or experience through a browser extension. Claiming that 99% of people eat Cheetos with their dominant hand, the company surmises that “Cheetos lovers need to live their life by using their Other Hand.”
In a promotional video, Cheetos shows actual designers from the advertising agency SG&P with orange fingers on one hand talking self-seriously about what in essence is a font that looks like it was made by toddlers.
“If you design a type right, it becomes very versatile and you can use it for corporate communication, for booklets, for websites, for TikTok videos,” says SG&P cofounder Rich Silverstein over images of the terrible font on a mug, a tote, and a tattoo that reads “Carpe Diem.”
Like Walmart making fun of its own recent rebrand by posting a meme imagining its “spark” logo getting increasingly bigger over time, Cheetos shows there’s fun to be had by not taking graphic design so seriously—and there’s an audience that’s in on the joke.
Released in time for National Handwriting Day, the approach to Other Hand font isn’t one that would work for most other brands, but for a snack food with a cartoon cheetah as its mascot, the playfulness fits. It’s a stunt font so bad that it just might be good.
