DP and I were talking yesterday about packaging design from the perspective of what's printed on it, rather than the object itself — he was ranting away in the kitchen that all pasta should have a large clock symbol on the front with a number on it, so you don't have to hunt for the cooking time.
This triggered me to launch into a tirade about how half of nearly everyone's adult life is spent presbyopic, but manufacturers still print important information in e.g. tiny misaligned pale blue text on slightly paler blue background. With yellow splodges.
And how, as well as vision difficulties (including colour blindness, which is ridiculously common in men but is still too often ignored as an accessibility issue), reading barriers are also incredibly common, including people with dyslexia, with English as a second language, who have had strokes, who struggled at school, etc., and it's frustrating when important info on packaging (and elsewhere, too, obviously) is buried deep in paragraphs of minuscule text with poor organisation and non-distinguishable headings — many people can quickly scan their eyes over the writing and identify which part has the info they need, but many will have to slog through it until they get to the right bit. I know it must be difficult to fit everything in but surely they can do better than some of the impenetrable walls of text I see on even spacious packaging.
And it surely isn't beyond us to implement a standardised system of symbols on all large-enough packaging that tells you at a glance if a product contains or may contain nuts or crustaceans or gluten? And always in the same place, preferably! Back bottom left or something. And with a mandatory publicly-accessible database of foods, cosmetics, cleaning products, and so on, and their relevant irritants and allergens and stuff, that anyone can write APIs for. (Cleaning products especially piss me off — if you have a sensitivity to, say, SLS, then you need to avoid it in things that go on your body like shower gel, which do list ingredients, but you'll probably also want to avoid it in your washing-up liquid, which doesn't have to list it. I end up downloading the sodding safety data sheets from the internet and trying to decipher them to work out if such-and-such a "sensitive"-branded washing-up liquid will bring a family member out in weeping sores.)
Lack of standardisation, and not knowing what info to expect where, drives me crackers. Allergen labelling is pretty good for the most part (though all the "may contain…" "produced in a facility which…" type of stuff being voluntary makes me uncomfortable), but dear God, I'm fed up of scouring the whole packet in case this item is one of those products that has a sneaky "may contain" warning on the opposite side of the packaging to the bloody ingredients list, rather than directly underneath.
But you can bet they spend fucking weeks perfecting the exact curvature of each photographed Dorito on the front of the packet and selecting which bag material makes precisely the right crinkling sound.
Ahhhhhh, that's better.