Introduction

We love Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap! It’s fair trade and has no detergents or foaming agents. The bottle is 100% post-consumer recycled plastic. But most of all, there’s the label. That dense manifesto where capital letters and mantras run wild. Where Helvetica and Times are knocked-out, justified, squished, squeezed, and wrapped all the way around the bottle, with as many as 250 characters per line.

“Absolute cleanliness is Godliness!” it starts. And if this maze of rhetoric about Spaceship Earth, the Moral ABCs, lessons, quotes, and creation myths reads like it was written by an escaped mental patient, it’s because it was.

Every so often a designer leaves the tingling memories of a refreshing shower behind and sits down to think: That bottle deserves more. What if the typography was improved? I should do something about this!

So here we are. The Dr. Bronner All-One Typography Challenge! Un-sanctioned and entirely independent but fully in good faith. Now’s your chance to turn this charming eyesore into something a typographer can respect. After all, “Whatever unites mankind is better than whatever divides us!”

