Sanofi
At Sanofi’s development centre in Cologne, new dosage forms are born, and an electronic tongue measures how they taste. That knowledge was meant to go up on the walls, clear even to people who never set foot in the lab. We designed a poster series that turns lab methods into pictures. Understood in passing, explored in depth when you stop.
- Services
- Layout grid
- Typography
- Information graphics
- Product pictograms
- Poster series
- Year
- 2014
Galenics, rheology, potentiometric measurement: what a development centre can do isn’t visible from the outside. Nobody stops at a wall full of jargon.
So two jobs on one sheet: make an impression in passing and offer depth up close. Plus a series that any new topic slots into by itself.
A poster is read from a distance first, then up close. So the grid works in stages: a large, light title, a strong subtitle, an introduction in full sentences. Only then come the columns on measurement technology.
Each stage is indented a little further. The eye follows, no arrow needed.
- 01 / 04Twelve columns, edge to edge. Seventy by a hundred centimetres holds a lot of text. Twelve borderless columns give every block its place before a single word is set.
- 02 / 04The title keeps one column’s distance. Above and to the side, the same amount of air. The big, thin word rests in the format instead of bumping into the edge.
- 03 / 04Every level steps further in. Title, subtitle, detail, application: each stage starts further to the right. Read only the beginning and you understand the topic. Step closer and you find the measurement technology.
- 04 / 04From sixty millimetres down to six. The title is ten times the height of the body text. In between, three stages where the eye can climb back in at any time.
The electronic tongue recognises taste with up to seven sensors, reproducibly and without a panel of human testers. The device itself looks like none of that. So the graphic shows what it imitates: a tongue with circuit tracks running across it.
Biology and electronics in one motif. You get the principle before you read the first sentence.
- 01 / 04The familiar first. To most people, an electronic tongue is a box with probes. So the graphic starts with the organ everyone knows, framed as if under a magnifying glass.
- 02 / 04Every taste gets its own line. Bitter, salty, sour and sweet run across the tongue like tracks on a circuit board. One glance makes it clear: biology is being translated into electronics.
- 03 / 04Taste buds become sensors. Where the lines end, rings sit like solder points. Receptor and sensor in one picture.
- 04 / 04The centre stays almost empty. On a real tongue there are hardly any taste buds there, so the graphic leaves it bare too. Details like that tell experts that someone looked closely.
Essentiale is a brand with a long tradition, a strong reputation and strong competition. It keeps moving by finding ever new routes to the patient.
The poster puts the brand at the centre, with every dosage form orbiting it as a pictogram. What’s already on the market and what’s still in development is clear at once. The whole strategy fits on one sheet.
Measurement technology and brand strategy have little in common. Their posters have plenty: the same grid, the same light title, the same stages. Only the colour changes with the topic.
The next topic doesn’t need a new design. Just a new colour and something worth telling.
Planning something similar? info@vertikahl.com