Cinnamon Toast Crunch - The Cinnamon Toast Pup

For this project, the task was simple: take an assigned animal and cereal brand, and recreate a box design. I was assigned a dog and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

On this mockup and following die line image, the General Mills and Cinnamon Toast Crunch names and logos were provided. Everything else I created myself in Adobe Illustrator.

Everything in the nutrition facts panel was custom made by me. I wanted to create it myself instead of using an image from the internet or stock site. The UPC is also a perfect replication of a Cinnamon Toast Crunch UPC, so if it were printed and scanned, it should show up as an actual box of cereal. Just a little fun fact about the project I enjoy sharing.

As for the dog itself, the process was a lot of fun, and I thoroughly enjoyed the entirety of it.

I went through a few different design options for the dog, and I ended up taking inspiration from the current Cinnamon Toast Crunch characters.

I started off with the piece of cereal, and emulated the goofy characteristics of the cereal characters. After that, I added in the cinnamon sugar clouds for the dog's ears and tail.

The strokes on the character are used with an artistic brush to give it the rough lines. Those same strokes are what I used to create the flavor stripes on the body of the character. The lighting and shadows that are seen were created using transparency options such as multiply.

For the clouds of sugar behind the pup, I created the swirls using the pen tool in Illustrator and grouped them together. I then duplicated and rotated them to get two separate angles. Once they were positioned where I wanted them, I used two different brush styles, both artistic brushes, to get the blurred and powdery look that you can see.