Sydney design studio Toko redesigns Aldi in a challenge set by UK publication Icon Magazine
August 30 2013, 11:39 am | | 8 Comments
Every month Icon Magazine invites a selected design studio to redesign/rethink an everyday object or brand, looking at ways to improve it. Always wondered why ‘discount’ looks the way it looks, Toko took on the challenge to rethink the ‘discount-look’. Designing ‘discount’, without the troublesome aesthetics and homogenous ‘discount clichés’.
This year exactly 100 years old, a heavily dated logo and identity, discount-king Aldi presented us the ultimate ‘design challenge’.
Embracing Aldi’s discount image, Toko’s re-design replaces expensive product photography by DIY flatbed scans (all images are in-house scans of actual products), and fancy words are traded for honest, simple and 
straight forward communication.
8 Comments
Um, is Aldi still a supermarket in this redesign?
Have you honestly always wondered “why discount looks the way it looks?” You must surely know it’s so consumers think it’s cheap. Your average Joe wouldn’t even know what this brand is. I’m all for improving things, but this is a little student-y naive for a grown-up design firm isn’t it?
No offense but what has a b&w / muted colour palette and hipster-inspired typography and image style to do with a cheap and cheerful discount supermarket? The logo is nice but he overall look and feel is just wrong.
You realise that this work is intended to promote Toko as designers/creative thinkers right? It’s not actually for Aldi :S
I like it. Obviously it’s not an actual rebrand but an idea, like a concept car. Comments above are just redicul and once again show the narrowmindedness of the industry.
The thinking behind this design is really strong.
I’d love to see how this redesign could play out in-store.
At the moment, all the collateral photographed for the article promises a style and experience that would be badly undermined once the customer walked through the turnstile at the front of the store.
BUT
Just because you’re cheap doesn’t mean you have to be tacky.
It wouldn’t be hard to change the in-store so that it worked well with the rest of the design – and still keep to the “we’re cheap because we keep it simple” promise.
Hi Cog Dis,
Indeed. The below Facebook link shows a bit more including the last bit of the text which is not included in the piece above. Obviously this has been an attempt to approach a case like this from a different angle and we understand the complexity of the industry and its marketing requirements. We have worked on several (additional) pieces of collateral including in-store materials but Icon magazine allows for 1 page only so we prioritised presented items.
Thank you for your thoughts!
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.561481613899202.1073741825.387271311320234&type=1
Just for interest, the ‘heavily dated’ logo was actually updated as recently as 2008. The ‘A’ was slightly straightened in the update to possibly be considered an ‘H’ so as to include their business in Austria which trades as Hofer. :0)