McDonald’s is unveiling a tasty new sauce this week and the fast-food chain wants you to memorialize the occasion with a limited edition poster.
To accompany the release of the Buttermilk Crispy Tenders, McDonald’s is unleashing one new dipping sauce. The condiment will join 8 other currently available sauces, with all 9 getting its own custom-designed poster. The artwork is the result of a collaboration with graphic studio design, Delicious Design League (DDL).
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PopCulture.com spoke with the creative director of DDL, Billy Baumann, who dished on teaming up with McDonald’s, as well as the creative process behind making the posters.
“[Working with McDonald’s] was sort of amazing, I think, that a giant, global brand like McDonald’s would do something as audacious as this, in a way, because there’s not big pictures of the tenders on these posters,” he said.
“There’s not pictures of kids eating sauce, which you would sort of typically think of as a global brand like McDonald’s would do,” he continued. “The fate of advertising these days, you can’t just say, ‘Yum, try our sauces.’ You have to try and connect with people in other ways, and so I think for them to try to do something like this is really pretty bold, and pretty cool, and hopefully, people take notice.
Baumann explained that each poster has its own unique touch, but still shares a connectivity to the other artworks.
“While the posters share a common theme, each one has its own flavor to reflect the individual sauce,” he said. “The goal wasn’t to simply reflect McDonald’s but rather to be a visual representation of each sauce.”
“I think early on in the process we thought, ‘Well, how are we gonna unite all of these things? How are we going to link them all, and make sure they look like a cohesive unit?’ Then, at the end of the day, we felt it was more important to capture the spirit of the sauce in the poster, instead of serving McDonald’s brand, or something like that,” he continued.
Baumann says that the process behind creating the designs was similar to how the team would approach making a “band poster.”
“It’s a lot like working on any poster project, or gig poster. Say we do a poster for a band, we listen to the band’s lyrics, and we listen to the songs, and we listen to the mood of the band, and we get to come up with something that we think emulates that band’s sound without being literal,” he said.
The poster exclusively given to Popculture.com represents the Tangy BBQ. Baumann says that there is a story in the image that his team was trying to convey with the Tangy BBQ poster.
“I think with a lot of posters, it comes down to sort of a philosophy of the image should imply a story of some sort, so that the viewer can get lost into a poster because these aren’t really billboards,” Baumann said. “A billboard you drive down the street, you see a giant Big Mac, and it says, ‘Turn here for Big Macs.’”
Be sure to look out for the 8 other sauce posters that McDonald’s plans to reveal this week, and head over to participating locations on October 7 to pick up the limited time posters. To get a look at all the posters, go to ButtermilkCrispyTenders.com here.
