Trends serve a use, which is to remind us of exactly this fact. Whenever we paeans are told that we can't contribute a product idea, because the big ideas have to come from the big idea people, or that design concepts stem from "research," a trend comes along and reassures us that we're all equals after all.
I think that's probably a bit harsh. Marketing is hard. Try coming up with a new idea for a car advertisement. What can you do that already hasn't been done?
> The name is a play on the 80’s Italian design and architecture group Memphis, which positioned itself as a garish and child-like rejection of functionalist styles.
I'm surprised this article is referring to it as "Corporate Memphis", when Memphis was already commercialized heavily in the 1980s. Every mall in America looked like that.
What we have today I would think would be more like neo-Memphis. Similar, maybe less pastel and less gradients and less soft filtered.
That aesthetic screams 1986 to me. Not sure why I pick that year as it could apply to any number of years around that period; Nikelodeon shows well into the 90s used that aesthetic for sure.
Tim Burton's movies often have aesthetic mini-manifestos embedded in them. For example, Beetlejuice represented the reverse of the classic "ghost story", one in which the ghosts were sweet, earnest, and identifiable while the living people were horrid and monstrous. So for the Maitlands, Burton chose the aesthetic of their traditional Victorian Connecticut home with all its understated ornateness. The building has "character", which the young couple wish to preserve.
The Deetzes (except for Lydia) are represented by... Memphis. And the fact that they strip the home down and completely remodel it into a Memphis mishmash indicates how horrible and destructive they are.
That said, OG Memphis at least has an element of fun and funkiness to it. Think the opening titles of Saved by the Bell. Corporate Memphis is about as funky as the KPMG theme song: https://youtu.be/NCvKXgp-Awo
If you are a Brit (or even otherwise) I really recommend taking a look at Hurley's work [0]. The taglines for each resort are just superb - e.g. "Cleethorpes - The Final Resort"
As an aside, I'm reminded of the old joke that Cleethorpes doesn't have a twin town, but is in a suicide pact with Grimsby.
Very close to a racist video, this :) But as a colored person, it is just a cultural difference. People just associate certain things with skin color, and depending upon geographical location it can be an advantage or a disadvantage. I was in Greenville SC and they were the warmest people I ever met, but yeah they took their own time to let me in :-)
From a technical perspective I enjoy using graphics that are able to be rendered as a SVG. I believe that is why this style has taken off, it is able to be served and rendered with regard to performance. The article presents it as a change made by Apple, but it was really the frontend that pushed visuals like this.
I support redesigns every three years and have stopped recommending the faceless images that is Memphis Group. Trends are great, regular work to purge trends is even better.
> I believe that is why this style has taken off, it is able to be served and rendered with regard to performance.
Bingo. This and the flexibility to compose your own scenery from those illustration systems vs. hunting down the right stock image or hiring a photographer.
I don't think this has much to do with technology or Photoshop - these memes are always he case where a few leading agencies in NYC do something for some big clients and then everyone copies. It's 'creative herd mentality as driven by generally non-marketing CEO's making the final decision on creative'.
I think that the aim of this style is a type of corporate PR, to give off a safe, unoffensive feeling.
I then think that this feeling is intended to preempt the user's knowledge that the company is doing unethical things. Either environmentally, or with the user's private data, or otherwise.
I think its interesting that the flat look was pioneered by Microsoft going back to the days of the Zune2 and later lumia phones that had the first Metro interface. Then google and Apple and everyone else started following. People don't think of Microsoft (and especially Zune...) as a leader in design, but I think they have had a big impact on the industry, and deserves some recognition.
I think you can probably trace some influence even further back to webTV. Check out its flat "10-foot UI" from 1999: https://youtu.be/eHJN9cMo4P4?t=156
And then in 2006 (per Wikipedia), "Xbox 360 overseer J Allard ran the [Toshiba Gigabeat 1089] project, codenamed 'Argo', staffed with Xbox and MSN Music Store developers who worked on 'Alexandria', finalized as Zune Marketplace."
Not at the moment, but the design elements are similar enough to the ones I'd see on my satellite receiver OSD menus from back in the early 2000s. I could tell that those were 3D as well at the time, and my TV at the time was a fuzzy 36" CRT from the 1990s.
And I'm glad for it! 3D design elements make a lot of sense on those kinds of displays, because they work well to stand out despite the relatively low resolution and color contrast.
After Windows 95 came out, fucking everyone used Franklin Black in their advertisements. I saw it everywhere -- online, on billboards, in television advertisements. Microsoft may have the aesthetic tastes of a lame, "greetings fellow young people" dad, but they were the biggest name in the tech field... and that meant people copied their design language in the hopes of seeming equally big and important.
You don't get credit for being the first, you get credit for being significant. Zune and Windows Phone didn't get "people" into flatter aesthetics, Apple did.
The skeuomorphic to flat transition that the Windows Phone did was beautiful and groundbreakingly different. I loved it. Shame about the rest of that OS.
Metro was minimalist in a highway sign sense - less color, lots of emphasis on text and distinct shapes/outlines. I don't think flat designs we have now are all that similar.
It’s largely driven by corporations trying to be as broad and inoffensive as possible.
Not sure what skin color to use? Make them blue. Are your depictions of humans too thin, or too ableist? Make them misshapen blobs so nobody can tell. Not sure how to include non-binary representation? Just make them all genderless.
Corporate culture has deemed it a better tradeoff to be called uncreative than to be called k-ist or j-phobic. Most of these people just want to do their jobs and go home at the end of the day, not thread the political needle at great expense if it goes wrong.
There used to be true artistry and celebration of beauty in corporate advertising. Look at the works of Toulouse-Lautrec or Alphonse Mucha. But no college kid is going to be putting up posters of these misshapen flat people in their college dorm.
The difference between the crude poster you linked to and the women portrayed by Mucha is enormous. I would say the poster you cited does not celebrate beauty at all. This one, for Trappist Liquor, does:
https://www.allposters.com/-sp/Trappistine-Liquors-Posters_i...
In the gay community you’ll still see these kind of ads in 2021. And I don’t think anyone particularly cares...
Yes, it’s a cheap trick and tacky. But it’s also a recognition that sexual desire and beauty are real things and a part of our shared human experience.
> Merrill: I think Facebook is probably the biggest example of it. They went through a phase where they were using this style universally. And, you know, they are one of the darkest companies as far as how they’re using that customer data. And it is all about this idea of, “Trust me. I’m a trustworthy company.” And let’s not look behind the curtain and see what’s actually going on. So I think it’s a really nefarious way to hide behind visual language.
My immediate thought was of rhetorical training in the ancient world. On the one hand, training in rhetoric will help you persuade, and on the other, will also help you become aware when someone else is using those techniques.
One of the five parts of rhetoric was called "ethos", which is concerned with how to establish yourself with your audience as trustworthy and sympathetic. In advertising, lots of elements beyond mere words are employed to establish ethos, visual style, sound, editing.
But I suppose I never explicitly considered the visual display of an application as an exercise in rhetoric, though upon reflection, it certainly can be. Perhaps we all need visual-rhetorical training.
The trend is real but it is also pretty innocuous. I know that design people think that these things influence collective consciousness in a deep way but really it is just another cog in the wheel.
In my personal experience, the primary reason that design teams prefer this style is that it is able to clearly represent a diverse and inclusive audience. Inclusivity and diversity are very important goals for most American companies. Part of this may be related to certain liberal ideologies but most of this is just about capitalism. America is a diverse country and most American companies also harbor aspirations to serve global markets. Having a simple way to show that your products can solve problems for everyone is just good for business.
A subtle distinction here:
The goal is not for the company to look diverse but rather for the product/service to appeal to a diverse customer/user base. This is a formidable design challenge. Depicting the full range of human life is not really possible with half a dozen images. The solution that everyone has landed on is to lower the fidelity of the representation. If we get rid of photorealism, 3d features, texture and other high resolution features, then a single illustration can encompass a much greater slice of humanity than a photograph could. I'm sure that there are other solutions to this design problem but I don't think that anything will replace the Memphis aesthetic until people understand the needs that led to its ubiquity. Any alternative aesthetic will need to satisfy the same basic business requirements.
Chicken and egg. If you're a company that isn't very diverse but is trying to change that, a good first step is to present diversity. If that's the ONLY step, then sure go ahead and drag them, but it's not bad on its face.
Had a discussion about this style with an illustrator friend a few months ago.
Illustration is genuinely better at conveying concepts than photography, and everyone is tired of lightbulbs, puzzle pieces, people in suits shaking hands and other stock photo cliches.
Problem is, commissioning an illustrator, especially a good one, is expensive and time consuming and takes excellent art direction to get right.[1]
This style however, is cheap, easy (anyone with a bit of drawing ability can do it), it’s sort of cozy and friendly, and doesn’t have any real negative cultural associations. It also wasn’t, until about six months ago, so totally overexposed it’s become a cliche in itself.
Now, there’s no excuse to use it - just betrays a fatal lack of originality. Might as well include an image of someone reaching up to a blue wireframe globe superimposed with zeroes and ones and @ symbols.
[1] Original illustration isn’t used nearly as much as it could or should be in digital products. Nautil.us do it well, but they are a magazine. Seriously, commission more illustration, it’s great.
I do a ton of direct response ad creative. Generally stock photos work really well if chosen with care, but brands shy away from them due to perceived cheapness. Their loss.
Reminds me a bit of the infamous Grubhub ad that came out a few months ago[1] - similarities include the color scheme, the checklist approach to racial diversity, and the attempt to project generic inoffensive "fun". The Grubhub ad, at least, is so bad that it's entertaining.
> “From a design point of view, it’s pretty lazy,” says Hurley.
I love designers criticizing design used for business. It rarely incorporates any perspective on business objectives. As long as the design is achieving its goal then who cares?
Because they are professionals. Software engineers, lawyers, doctors... skilled people who have creative control often put pride into their work as a means of expressing their talent and enthusiasm, even if it doesn’t make a direct tangible difference.
Because design/illustration can be demonstrably meaningful and/or useful and/or informative &c. Whereas this is a nullification: at this point in time [as it reaches a kind of saturation point] it's a mass-produceable toolkit for generating inoffensive fluff to fill space. In the sense that it cannot fail at doing nothing much, then sure, it has succeeded. But the goal is to...do what exactly? It's kitsch. Good design tends to take quite a bit of thought: this takes very little. Hence, lazy.
I hate Corporate Memphis as much as the next person but
> “Isometric perspective is interesting, because nothing recedes to a vanishing point,” Rudnick says, “and therefore it also eliminates the variable of time.” He points out that this type of design is particularly popular with fintech and mortgage companies – playing down the passage of time is particularly advantageous to firms selling financial products that you may end up paying off for years.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who detected the scent of what I call "arthouse wankery" here. This is popular for the same reason flat UIs are popular - they're easy to create, blandly inoffensive, and convey "modern" to the viewer.
Seriously. It has a lot more to do with the idea too that if you look similar to other big companies who are using it then you'll get a modicum of a trust factor out of the gate than some nefarious psy op.
In an exactly same way,as all the energy companies went on to use green colour on thier websites,while anything enterprise software related was always blue/skye blue. Nothing really new on this front.
I wouldn't tar all of design theory with the brush of being Kabbalistic medieval-metaphysics-like random intuitive associations. Only some of it is like that.
Not quite sure what you're trying to say: that applies in similar ways to basically every academic speciality. And what the parent quoted: it's just an observation based on theory, similar historical trends, and his own practice. It might be _wrong_, but it's not metaphysics or random association. It's not even really an academic point at all, it's a technical point: specific art styles are commonly used to communicate certain messages to the viewer. The utilitatarian reasons for "why this style" are all correct, but they provide only half an explanation
It is absolutely real [1][2], and was quite the scandal at the time. If the reporting is to be believed, PepsiCo paid about $1 million for the branding strategy. All to arrive at a blob that looks like a fat person with a red shirt and blue pants separating from each other at the waistline [3]. So yes, it is a bit unreal.
I still remember the first time someone pointed it out to me all those years ago... I'll skip the steps of charting out hundreds of circles for millions of dollars and just say that I interpret it as a hyperreality.
I love this, true modern art. My favorite bit is on page 26, illustrating the "gravitational pull of Pepsi".
Is it just me, or do all the pepsi logos look like second place? I can't see them from a blank slate, but the smooth curves and contrasting colors scream #2 to me.
Oh, I remember this. I wonder how much of it was they came up with the design quickly and realized they had a lot of time and money left, so they got to work on the justification process that we see here.
This document is insane. It feels like everyone involved in the production of it is so utterly disconnected from reality.
That first page “Trajectory of innovation” with the pseudograph is an utterly hilarious distillation of the madness yet to come. The deeper I read into the document the worse it got.
Golden ratio, Patterns being found where there were none to begin with (“perimeter oscillations”), Pepsi Energy fields, Pepsi Universe.
This reads like a pamphlet buckling under the excited and emphatic pointing of a disheveled man with a tinfoil hat on saying “SEE, SEE THE TRUTH IS ALL IN HERE!”
What learning can be taken from this? Is it a case of the train of thought being very poorly explained? Or is it a case of self absorbed people surrounded by “yes-men” basking in the glory of their own brilliance?
That being stupidly outrageous is a great marketing strategy considering we're still all discussing a branding document from 2009. The gravitational pull of Pepsi is real! :)
I doubt the C-suit bought into the gravity argument. However there is a smile like quality to the new design, as is pointed out in the design docs, and this is probably what resonated with the executives during the pitch.
I also wonder about whether this document is actually the real one as presented to the company. For example am I the only one that sees the hint of a 'P' shape in the new whitespace between the red and blue colored elements? Wouldn't this have been a more convincing feature of the design to highlight than the pages about DNA, gravity and special relativity?
If a giant corporation offers up millions of dollars to have a design agency blow smoke up their ass, they will find an agency willing to generate as much smoke as needed to separate them from their cash.
The pepsi universe and magnetic fields parts are utter bs but there's some stuff in there that I feel matters, the shelf angles and golden ratio basis.
Rebranding and changing such an iconic logo would go all the way to the top, quite doubt such BS would fly with execs. I'm not a designer and I don't work at pepsi so who knows though.
This seems to have been created by a design company Arnell group for Pepsi. I wonder how much Pepsi paid them
>What learning can be taken from this? Is it a case of the train of thought being very poorly explained?
My first question would be if the rebranding was a success? I generally think people are too dismissive of seemingly insane approaches to work. If this guy or girl needed to channel ancient Indian traditions, golden ratios and numerology to get inspired and make the best pepsi logo they could make, who are we to judge
In particular for creative work, there's certainly a lot of good stuff that's born out of sheer insanity, maybe bullshitting too.
In my own art form (theater), there's a fair bit of effort spent being deliberately stupid in order to get us out of our existing patterns. A lot of famously idiotic acting exercises aren't really about the work you're doing, but about breaking your habits and being un-self-conscious about it.
The whole theory is that you can't think your way into a natural performance, unless what you want is exactly the same as the actor's own habits. There are things that make you instantly recognizeable even at a distance: how you walk, how much of a gap you place at the end of a sentence, how high you pitch your voice. A 3D model has the kind of control they need to walk in character, stand in character, raise their eyebrows in character, etc., but you don't. You have to first break your existing habits, then start from blank.
It's not the only way to act; you can get great performances without that. But it's a valid tool that works for some people.
I don't particularly like that new Pepsi logo, but it's still in use. They use it all over the place. So it sounds like it was moderately successful. It didn't become truly iconic (the way the Coca-Cola or Disney logos are), but that kind of success is rare.
I feel you, 100%, but still, might it not be true in a subliminal sense? It is easy to dismiss, and hard to prove, but at the same time this is exactly the plane of communication on which advertising and (other forms of) propaganda operate in large part. I feel pretty sure saying that at least not all of it is complete nonsense.
I'm an Orthodox Christian and was starting to write a really long post bordering on an essay about it. Yes, absolutely. Thank you for bringing it up.
I am not an iconographer, but I know that we hold onto a perspective with multiple vanishing points, creating intersecting diagonal perspective lines that closely resemble an isometric view precisely to create a timeless, comprehensive view of a liturgically significant event.
Marshall McLuhan said something along the lines of the development of linear perspective in the Renaissance ushering in a world that had at last a single point of view. I’ll give Rudnick some rope.
Thanks for the link, I had no idea that it had a name. The folks on the site that starts with 4 and ends with chan have done some funny parodies of it.
You know, it takes some real work to do a Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman ad. There's a kind of artistic malaise in the modern era.
Admittedly, you see that kind of look in vintage travel and airline posters.
The folks on the site that starts with 4 and ends with chan have done some funny parodies of it.
Thanks for the tip, I rarely visit that site but the parodies (while NSFW and not politically correct, in the usual manner) have been thoroughly, hilariously, entertaining. I think the fact that a style meant to be ultra-politically-correct getting turned into the exact opposite greatly added to the humour.
A lot of the reason for these design trends is that no one has the courage to think differently, so you get huge numbers of companies all looking virtually identical.
It's a bit like 'nobody gets fired for buying IBM/McKinsey' etc...no one challenges product managers and marketing when yet another adobe illustrator generated Memphis style brand identity & UI is unveiled, complete with multi cultural inclusive visual banality. At some point this will suddenly be deader than an animated gif of a flame and the next trend will quickly become ubiquitous.
When I’m trying to do computer tasks, I want to get them done, not decipher some design wonks metaphor and hyperbole.
You want thinking different? Try trotting out a line that doesn’t start out like an old man pissed at them kids for not being as competent as folks were “back in his day.”
The whole point of modern logistics is to simplify them so we can maximize time for ourselves instead of flogging the profit chant of last generations rubes seeking Valhalla.
Lumping in cultural inclusivity with your critique is quite revealing. There's nothing in the article or about this style of illustration that hints at cultural values, why include it in the tirade?
Racialization - making everything about racial characteristics and pitting races against each other - is what has been 'on trend' recently and the world is a poorer place for it. Anti racism has been around forever and always should be, because drawing attention to and excluding people due to their race is completely unacceptable in liberal democracy merit based societies.
I don't see how putting people with darker skin in art could possibly be seen as "pitting races against each other". Would the artstyle be improved if it only depicted white people?
The pictures in the article include skin tones such as purple and fuschia.
To me this visual style screams:
“Of COURSE we’re totally ok with…those people we cannot correctly enumerate, even superficially. That doesn’t mean we’d include anything too controversial like those <insert racial epithet here>‘s.”
To each their own, I guess. At least they’re trying?
That’s actually not what racialization means. Racialization is the creation of race as a social construct. “Racial characteristics” aren’t fixed; the Nazis considered Jewish people a “race” despite what they looked like.
Race isn’t a real thing. It’s something we made up because it was a justification for why it was ok to oppress people with the characteristics we dislike (we tried enslaving people with lighter skin; turns out they were able to escape and blend in with the population).
@wayoutthere In sociology racialization/ethnicization is ascribing ethnic or racial identities to a relationship, social practice, or group that did not identify itself as such.
You will find lots of groups of people who aren't happy about being categorized then defended or attacked by people who are 'speaking for them'.
The obvious current example is the overwhelmingly white US #BLM movement. If you go to a California black neighborhood and talk to people they are v suspicious of BLM's motives. Another new one is the latest acronym #AANHPI (Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander).
I don't enjoy being categorized, pigeon holed and criticized like any other sane person but we appear to be in the midst of a mania for people speaking on behalf of others to push their own agendas.
I heard Tulsi Gabbard (an'#AANHPI POC') use the term racialization of everything recently and think she is sensible and spot on with her one love messaging and pointing out the endless divisions currently being created in societies.
Regarding slavery, I'm sure you're aware there are more slaves in Africa now than there were in the brief era when european and US maritime merchants bought slaves off slavers along with other 'products'? The current specious rewriting of history to imply slavery was invented by colonial white people is so far off base it is a huge danger to society and ignores today's realities. It is also a powerful tool for feeding racialization paranoias.
> If you go to a California black neighborhood and talk to people they are v suspicious of BLM's motives.
Have you done this? I live in a majority black neighborhood but not in California and I talk to my neighbors. I have heard a lot of skepticism and hostility towards _the organization calling itself by that name_. But not towards the movement itself or the phrase it uses to represent itself.
It’s a talking point from the right I’ve been hearing recently, along with “there were more slaves in Africa than the US”. It’s just more whataboutisms to distract from the utter lack of coherent policy from that side of the US political spectrum.
The person you're replying to did not at any point say that.
What he said was that deflecting criticism of slavery in North America by mentioning slavery in Africa is an attempt to mislead by distraction, i.e., whataboutism. Yes, there were horrible things done elsewhere; but that does lessen the horrible things done in the USA in any way.
I have done this, yes. Your point is well taken: no question there is support for less racism towards black people (including racism amongst black peoples) but there is often deep suspicion about political motives of movements, from the black power 70's to the current Marxist BLM leadership.
Many POC are right wing of course, an inconvenient truth for people who like to think we live in a world of blue (good) versus Red (bad).
I was an art director and a creative director last century - mine was not a tirade, more observation of cowardly corporate clients.
Regarding 'multi cultural inclusive visual banality' this is a cultural low tide that is dropping all boats IMO: portraying everyone as mediocre little personas with cute skin colors and different simplified costumes like a cast of playmobile people.
Almost no ordinary company wants to present themselves as wholly bizarre and strange. Many companies want to present themselves as basically normal but with a few interesting quirks and affections. Getting that balance right is hard, so you get the system that the article describes; it lets a variety of organizations appear slightly different in more or less the same way.
People manage "coolness" effectively for upward mobility integrate the unusual into something that's mostly mainstream - have a leather jacket or a quirky haircut or whatever. I'll spend time at industrial music festivals where no one expects to get but that's a decision and not the sort that anyone should expect a business to make.
(also, you'd do well to avoid the multiculturalism issue)
Interestingly, this has spread to second-tier virtual worlds. Decentraland, Sominium Space, and Facebook Horizon all have that look. It's the opposite of the realistic, gritty world of AAA game titles.
It's safe and banal. Facebook is very concerned about "safety".[1] By which they mean "no sex", not "no scams". Their solution to this in Horizon is that their characters have no body below the waist.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadDidn't find it myself so I came back to HN and saw GP comment. Then cmd+f for "italian" to find it in the article.
From the article.
The Memphis-esque style is definitely having a moment. You'll notice that the Chillwave aesthetic borrowed a ton of visual cues as well.
What we have today I would think would be more like neo-Memphis. Similar, maybe less pastel and less gradients and less soft filtered.
The Deetzes (except for Lydia) are represented by... Memphis. And the fact that they strip the home down and completely remodel it into a Memphis mishmash indicates how horrible and destructive they are.
That said, OG Memphis at least has an element of fun and funkiness to it. Think the opening titles of Saved by the Bell. Corporate Memphis is about as funky as the KPMG theme song: https://youtu.be/NCvKXgp-Awo
https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/q_glossy,ret_img,w_925/http...
As an aside, I'm reminded of the old joke that Cleethorpes doesn't have a twin town, but is in a suicide pact with Grimsby.
[0] https://www.pinterest.co.uk/christinefbosha/jack-hurley-post...
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/nov/29/rubbish-seasi...
(if you must ask it was the farmer's market)
I support redesigns every three years and have stopped recommending the faceless images that is Memphis Group. Trends are great, regular work to purge trends is even better.
Bingo. This and the flexibility to compose your own scenery from those illustration systems vs. hunting down the right stock image or hiring a photographer.
[1] https://pages.uncc.edu/visualrhetoric/projects/individual-pr...
I then think that this feeling is intended to preempt the user's knowledge that the company is doing unethical things. Either environmentally, or with the user's private data, or otherwise.
A good example is Google, (see some corporate memphis here, https://blog.google/technology/health/when-it-comes-mental-h...), who needs to project this image in order for you to feel safe while sharing your most private details with the company.
Microsoft's UltimateTV set-top-box hardware group got folded into the Xbox division in 2002: https://www.mrt.com/news/article/Microsoft-to-Eliminate-TV-D...
And then in 2006 (per Wikipedia), "Xbox 360 overseer J Allard ran the [Toshiba Gigabeat 1089] project, codenamed 'Argo', staffed with Xbox and MSN Music Store developers who worked on 'Alexandria', finalized as Zune Marketplace."
That doesn't look flat whatsoever. There are plenty of three-dimensional layout elements in that UI.
And I'm glad for it! 3D design elements make a lot of sense on those kinds of displays, because they work well to stand out despite the relatively low resolution and color contrast.
The skeuomorphic to flat transition that the Windows Phone did was beautiful and groundbreakingly different. I loved it. Shame about the rest of that OS.
Not sure what skin color to use? Make them blue. Are your depictions of humans too thin, or too ableist? Make them misshapen blobs so nobody can tell. Not sure how to include non-binary representation? Just make them all genderless.
If you're going to do this, at least use creativity. Discord does a fantastic job of being inclusive and yet creative.
I... guess "celebration of beauty" is a good description, but let's be honest: it's insulting and artistically lazy.
I wasn't trying to character assassinate your favourite commercial artists. I was trying to claim that they aren't representative of the past.
Yes, it’s a cheap trick and tacky. But it’s also a recognition that sexual desire and beauty are real things and a part of our shared human experience.
Here's another angle: It's Killing Brands https://www.aleksandrhovhannisyan.com/blog/blue-people-illus...
https://www.marketplace.org/2021/04/15/a-primer-on-corporate...
> Merrill: I think Facebook is probably the biggest example of it. They went through a phase where they were using this style universally. And, you know, they are one of the darkest companies as far as how they’re using that customer data. And it is all about this idea of, “Trust me. I’m a trustworthy company.” And let’s not look behind the curtain and see what’s actually going on. So I think it’s a really nefarious way to hide behind visual language.
One of the five parts of rhetoric was called "ethos", which is concerned with how to establish yourself with your audience as trustworthy and sympathetic. In advertising, lots of elements beyond mere words are employed to establish ethos, visual style, sound, editing.
But I suppose I never explicitly considered the visual display of an application as an exercise in rhetoric, though upon reflection, it certainly can be. Perhaps we all need visual-rhetorical training.
Illustration is genuinely better at conveying concepts than photography, and everyone is tired of lightbulbs, puzzle pieces, people in suits shaking hands and other stock photo cliches.
Problem is, commissioning an illustrator, especially a good one, is expensive and time consuming and takes excellent art direction to get right.[1]
This style however, is cheap, easy (anyone with a bit of drawing ability can do it), it’s sort of cozy and friendly, and doesn’t have any real negative cultural associations. It also wasn’t, until about six months ago, so totally overexposed it’s become a cliche in itself.
Now, there’s no excuse to use it - just betrays a fatal lack of originality. Might as well include an image of someone reaching up to a blue wireframe globe superimposed with zeroes and ones and @ symbols.
[1] Original illustration isn’t used nearly as much as it could or should be in digital products. Nautil.us do it well, but they are a magazine. Seriously, commission more illustration, it’s great.
I'd prefer that.
Hey, speak for yourself. That's more drawing ability than *I* have. :p
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-T3qKl6y-c
I love designers criticizing design used for business. It rarely incorporates any perspective on business objectives. As long as the design is achieving its goal then who cares?
> “Isometric perspective is interesting, because nothing recedes to a vanishing point,” Rudnick says, “and therefore it also eliminates the variable of time.” He points out that this type of design is particularly popular with fintech and mortgage companies – playing down the passage of time is particularly advantageous to firms selling financial products that you may end up paying off for years.
seems like it’s reading a bit too much.
In 2030, it will feel clunky and old, to the sort of people who pay attention to these things.
2030 designers:
Ugh, you're still using squircles? Your icons should have translucent gradient blurred backgrounds!
Everyone knows large x-height sans serif fonts are untrustworthy lawyer text. Small x-height grotesks convey likeability.
[1] https://adage.com/article/agency-news/breathtaking-word-purp...
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/1160304/pepsi-logo-design-brief-...
[3] https://www.cannotunsee.net/post/730928004/pepsi
So what you're saying is that their new logo was really just their old mascot [1] who had let themselves go?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=pepsi%20man&tbs=img...
Is it just me, or do all the pepsi logos look like second place? I can't see them from a blank slate, but the smooth curves and contrasting colors scream #2 to me.
That first page “Trajectory of innovation” with the pseudograph is an utterly hilarious distillation of the madness yet to come. The deeper I read into the document the worse it got.
Golden ratio, Patterns being found where there were none to begin with (“perimeter oscillations”), Pepsi Energy fields, Pepsi Universe.
This reads like a pamphlet buckling under the excited and emphatic pointing of a disheveled man with a tinfoil hat on saying “SEE, SEE THE TRUTH IS ALL IN HERE!”
What learning can be taken from this? Is it a case of the train of thought being very poorly explained? Or is it a case of self absorbed people surrounded by “yes-men” basking in the glory of their own brilliance?
That being stupidly outrageous is a great marketing strategy considering we're still all discussing a branding document from 2009. The gravitational pull of Pepsi is real! :)
I also wonder about whether this document is actually the real one as presented to the company. For example am I the only one that sees the hint of a 'P' shape in the new whitespace between the red and blue colored elements? Wouldn't this have been a more convincing feature of the design to highlight than the pages about DNA, gravity and special relativity?
If a giant corporation offers up millions of dollars to have a design agency blow smoke up their ass, they will find an agency willing to generate as much smoke as needed to separate them from their cash.
Rebranding and changing such an iconic logo would go all the way to the top, quite doubt such BS would fly with execs. I'm not a designer and I don't work at pepsi so who knows though.
This seems to have been created by a design company Arnell group for Pepsi. I wonder how much Pepsi paid them
My first question would be if the rebranding was a success? I generally think people are too dismissive of seemingly insane approaches to work. If this guy or girl needed to channel ancient Indian traditions, golden ratios and numerology to get inspired and make the best pepsi logo they could make, who are we to judge
In particular for creative work, there's certainly a lot of good stuff that's born out of sheer insanity, maybe bullshitting too.
The whole theory is that you can't think your way into a natural performance, unless what you want is exactly the same as the actor's own habits. There are things that make you instantly recognizeable even at a distance: how you walk, how much of a gap you place at the end of a sentence, how high you pitch your voice. A 3D model has the kind of control they need to walk in character, stand in character, raise their eyebrows in character, etc., but you don't. You have to first break your existing habits, then start from blank.
It's not the only way to act; you can get great performances without that. But it's a valid tool that works for some people.
I don't particularly like that new Pepsi logo, but it's still in use. They use it all over the place. So it sounds like it was moderately successful. It didn't become truly iconic (the way the Coca-Cola or Disney logos are), but that kind of success is rare.
I am not an iconographer, but I know that we hold onto a perspective with multiple vanishing points, creating intersecting diagonal perspective lines that closely resemble an isometric view precisely to create a timeless, comprehensive view of a liturgically significant event.
A tad ironic, as I'm actually browsing this from my schlaaang superseat.
You know, it takes some real work to do a Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman ad. There's a kind of artistic malaise in the modern era.
Admittedly, you see that kind of look in vintage travel and airline posters.
Thanks for the tip, I rarely visit that site but the parodies (while NSFW and not politically correct, in the usual manner) have been thoroughly, hilariously, entertaining. I think the fact that a style meant to be ultra-politically-correct getting turned into the exact opposite greatly added to the humour.
It's a bit like 'nobody gets fired for buying IBM/McKinsey' etc...no one challenges product managers and marketing when yet another adobe illustrator generated Memphis style brand identity & UI is unveiled, complete with multi cultural inclusive visual banality. At some point this will suddenly be deader than an animated gif of a flame and the next trend will quickly become ubiquitous.
Hopefully that will change, because it sure is boring.
You want thinking different? Try trotting out a line that doesn’t start out like an old man pissed at them kids for not being as competent as folks were “back in his day.”
The whole point of modern logistics is to simplify them so we can maximize time for ourselves instead of flogging the profit chant of last generations rubes seeking Valhalla.
Lumping in cultural inclusivity with your critique is quite revealing. There's nothing in the article or about this style of illustration that hints at cultural values, why include it in the tirade?
To me this visual style screams:
“Of COURSE we’re totally ok with…those people we cannot correctly enumerate, even superficially. That doesn’t mean we’d include anything too controversial like those <insert racial epithet here>‘s.”
To each their own, I guess. At least they’re trying?
Race isn’t a real thing. It’s something we made up because it was a justification for why it was ok to oppress people with the characteristics we dislike (we tried enslaving people with lighter skin; turns out they were able to escape and blend in with the population).
You will find lots of groups of people who aren't happy about being categorized then defended or attacked by people who are 'speaking for them'.
The obvious current example is the overwhelmingly white US #BLM movement. If you go to a California black neighborhood and talk to people they are v suspicious of BLM's motives. Another new one is the latest acronym #AANHPI (Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander).
I don't enjoy being categorized, pigeon holed and criticized like any other sane person but we appear to be in the midst of a mania for people speaking on behalf of others to push their own agendas.
I heard Tulsi Gabbard (an'#AANHPI POC') use the term racialization of everything recently and think she is sensible and spot on with her one love messaging and pointing out the endless divisions currently being created in societies.
Regarding slavery, I'm sure you're aware there are more slaves in Africa now than there were in the brief era when european and US maritime merchants bought slaves off slavers along with other 'products'? The current specious rewriting of history to imply slavery was invented by colonial white people is so far off base it is a huge danger to society and ignores today's realities. It is also a powerful tool for feeding racialization paranoias.
Have you done this? I live in a majority black neighborhood but not in California and I talk to my neighbors. I have heard a lot of skepticism and hostility towards _the organization calling itself by that name_. But not towards the movement itself or the phrase it uses to represent itself.
What he said was that deflecting criticism of slavery in North America by mentioning slavery in Africa is an attempt to mislead by distraction, i.e., whataboutism. Yes, there were horrible things done elsewhere; but that does lessen the horrible things done in the USA in any way.
Many POC are right wing of course, an inconvenient truth for people who like to think we live in a world of blue (good) versus Red (bad).
Regarding 'multi cultural inclusive visual banality' this is a cultural low tide that is dropping all boats IMO: portraying everyone as mediocre little personas with cute skin colors and different simplified costumes like a cast of playmobile people.
Almost no ordinary company wants to present themselves as wholly bizarre and strange. Many companies want to present themselves as basically normal but with a few interesting quirks and affections. Getting that balance right is hard, so you get the system that the article describes; it lets a variety of organizations appear slightly different in more or less the same way.
People manage "coolness" effectively for upward mobility integrate the unusual into something that's mostly mainstream - have a leather jacket or a quirky haircut or whatever. I'll spend time at industrial music festivals where no one expects to get but that's a decision and not the sort that anyone should expect a business to make.
(also, you'd do well to avoid the multiculturalism issue)
It's safe and banal. Facebook is very concerned about "safety".[1] By which they mean "no sex", not "no scams". Their solution to this in Horizon is that their characters have no body below the waist.
[1] https://youtu.be/Uf_9J_EdzZw