The goal of this project was to create a new Happy Meal with a 

different target audience and a distinct design style. This project

informs the consumer about other breakfast cultures around the

world while embodying the traditional American breakfast ideals.

Along with the design style, this project incorporates McDonald’s

iconic branding to create a more authentic experience.

The Breakfast Happy Meal as a concept comes with a few key issues.

Due to the nature of breakfast, the target audience moves from children to

older adolescents and adults. Because of this, certain elements of the Happy

Meal, such as the toy and the graphic style, needed to be adapted to the new

target audience. I did this by removing the toy and creating stylized graphics

that were more realistic than graphics typically displayed for children.

Adobe Illustrator

The Hotcakes box had to be custom made because the containers used at actual McDonald’s stores were too big to fit inside of a Happy Meal. I modeled the box after the nugget boxes that McDonald’s uses. Because I had to make the box smaller (and thus made the Hotcakes smaller) I opted to increase the number of Hotcakes from three to five. 

The hashbrown container used at McDonald’s is a paper bag, which I recreated for this Happy Meal. The sausages at McDonald’s are usually served with the Hotcakes container, but since I had to make the container smaller, I opted to put the sausages in their own container similar to the hashbrown container.  The sausage typically served in a       McDonald’s breakfast is circular, but in this scenario, the sausage that would be served would be in a stick form to fit in the bag better.

The coffee cup is a more simple design. I struggled to figure out a way to keep the cup consistent with the other items in the meal without making it feel too similar to everything else. I also needed to come up with a way to wrap the design around the cup so that the seem would be less noticeable. I discovered through my research that coffee is one of the most popular breakfast drinks worldwide, so I wanted to focus on that in the drink design. In order to bring some consistency over, I made some coffee beans in the same style used on the other objects in the meal.

For this project, I wanted to make sure that I gained a good understanding of the different regions I would be representing on the box. I looked into each of the three regions and wrote down anything significant about the customs, cultures, and foods as well as the sources I gathered the information from. Then I was able to cut down the information into what I wanted to include on the box.

My sketches led me to the ideas that I wanted to incorporate on the boxes and the items. In my sketches I wanted to emphasize the food items, and that carried into my design. Since I needed to create a lot of custom food containers, I also had to prototype all of the items.

For the artwork I built each food item out of a large amount of small, rigid geometric shapes. This process created a highly stylized graphic that didn’t feel too childish or immature for a more mature audience.

This project taught me a lot about working as an independent artist and how the design process works in a real world environment. Adjusting to an independent and self made timeline was a new experience for me, and it was difficult for me at times to stay focused and on track.  There were also some design flaws that were only made apparent after printing and assembling the project. If given more time to work on this project, I would like to go back and cahnge some aspects of the design, such as the background color compared to the background words and adding a way to fasten the handles together more securely. Overall I feel that this was a good exercise in real world design and creative processes, and I believe that this project has allowed me to learn more and grow as a designer.