EU Commission. Getting the same warning onto every pack in Europe.

How do you make one directive work across every kind of tobacco pack in Europe? Tobacco is the European Union's biggest cause of preventable death, killing nearly 700,000 people a year. To fight it, the EU brought in a sweeping new directive for tobacco packaging, stripping all branding away, cutting every pack back to a plain ‘drab brown’ and mandating combined picture-and-text health warnings, a separate general warning and country-specific contact details on every pack. It reached right across the market – cigarettes, hand-rolling tobacco, cigars, waterpipe and more – mandatory for cigarettes, roll-your-own and waterpipe, and left to each member state's discretion for the rest.

However, the exact size and position of the warnings had been written into law before anyone had audited the formats they’d need to fit, so for some packs the rules simply couldn't be met. And for cigar makers, never meant to fall under the mandatory rules, a member state choosing to enforce them could be an existential threat, since low volumes and bespoke production made compliance prohibitively expensive. The Commission's DG Sante brought us in to work all of this out, to audit what was really on the market, design the warnings and write the guidance for how they should appear on every tobacco pack in the EU-28.

We collected and audited more than 700 pack samples from across Europe, engaging government officials, tobacco industry representatives, printers and manufacturers, remaining impartial on every side. From that we distilled a ‘core’ set of pack formats, across every tobacco category, that covered the majority of the market, then worked out how (and whether) the warnings could physically be made to fit each one. The photography and the messages were fixed, but nothing else was, so we explored the colour, typography, image crops and options for the country-specific contact details, all strictly within the letter of the directive. The rest was detailed work, since each of the three warning sets carried the same twelve messages paired with different imagery, rotating year on year so every message appeared evenly. We resolved all of it into exact templates, one for every format, alongside a full implementation guide for the industry, then presented the approach to all 28 member states in Brussels, so every country could apply the same warnings the same way.