Visual Rhetoric: Weed Family Honey

 

While I originally went looking for the closest beekeepers that I know about in Cache Valley, Cox Honey, I could not see any sort of visual rhetoric on their website that was very clear to me. So I went looking for another website that would fulfill this assignment. I found Weed Family Honey. While both are visually appealing, I do have to say that the Weed Family, as a whole, is my preference. Why, you might ask. It has to do something with my love of the color green, and my bias to any kind of website that unconsciously looks like my website. 

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Exhibit C

The green and the gray reminded me of my GIS Portfolio, found here. I was pleased with this color arrangement, compared to the traditional brown and gold representing honey.

Visual Rhetoric: Text Elements

The text that stands out to me starts with the green banner stating “ENGINEERED BY NATURE”. Although Engineering is a rather artificial process of organizing naturally or unnaturally occurring items, it is implying the whole process from the molecular level up us all natural which is a critical selling point for heney because most honey is diluted with high-fructose corn syrup in China.

What I really enjoyed as a part-time graphic designer and GIS professional was the text hierarchy. First was the banner with a light serif typeface, with white text on a dark green background. Then to create contrast, there is a bold, black, sans serif font with thick cubic letters which state    RESPONSIBLY PRODUCED with tilde marks on either side.  This emphasizes the quality and accountability of the owners’ production process. The final best part of the text hierarchy involves a skinny sans serif font which gives us the meat of the matter, the details that sum up the final message:

RAW HONEY

UTAH'S OWN &

LOCALLY FARMED

(and also amazing for you)

(Google Docs copy paste does not do this justice)

We make raw honey, we don’t add high-fructose corn syrup (hopefully), it is a locally owned business and locally farmed, meaning there are less steps from the hive to the home to interfere with the quality of the jar. It then implies health benefits--without explaining what they are pointing out by saying (and also amazing for you).

Finally to create a sense of repetition while getting to the main pint, the serif font from the green banner, in a bold format is used again to state:

IT'S THAT GOOD

In other words, the owners want you to know it’s all true.

So now, the color of the visual rhetoric is used again. The green of the banner and the background represents vibrant plant life--the kind of thing you want in a quality jar of honey. Seeing green plant life in the wild is calming. A black jar can contrast well with the gold of the honey, so long as it is only solid matte black. Orange can go well with it, but in the case of Weed Family Honey, this may be a subtle joke on the part of their surname--Weeds being plant life, and so they tie in a great visual hierarchy, with a great choice of fonts, and a dry sense of humor expressed in the whole of their website. Finally, they add in a “Shop Now” Button with an arrow to convince people to follow their lead. This is the clincher for their argument but for the undecided shopper, there are more items to glance at. The Raw Honey section uses a serif font below the sans serif title to explain the same thing as above:

ALL OF OUR HONEY IS  MINIMALLY STRAINED TO GET THE WAX OUT  AND  GREAT TASTING  . WE DON'T USE ANY FANCY FILTERING EQUIPMENT.

The shop now button finishes that argument. The same thing is for the Beeswax, but the pink button with the customer fave, attracts interest on the dark background and makes it stand out. The shop button completes the favorable argument.

.This is well thought out advertising, and helps Weed Family honey sell their product. It also emphasizes the importance of farmers in a wannabe organic world. Long ago farmers touted their use of DDT. Now they absolutely abhor and abstain from it and other pesticides due to new and evolving customer preferences. I guarantee that Weed Family Honey uses anti mite and anti fungal drugs--but to sell their product they don’t mention that and for a good reason, they want to be seen as organic as any other farmer.