"a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
It kind of makes me sad thinking about all the time and talent and money that went into this with the main purpose of getting people to buy and drink more (unhealthy) colored, carbonated, sugar water.
despite how silly this may seem to many in the HN audience, I will contend that:
if you were running a multi-billion dollar sugar water company whose main moat is the brand, and spent hundreds of millions on ads each year as one of the key line items in the budget, you too would want this level of sophistication and thought put into a brand refresh. Probably even more.
And you can imagine that this document was debated for weeks or months by the highest level executives as well as whole departments of marketers. They probably had multiple documents like this from multiple agencies. With that level of internal debate, all the granular side-by-side process diagrams are a necessary part of the UX here, to guide along the audience that only sees the pdf and can't talk to the agency designers.
You could say that about anything that looks silly. At some point you gotta actually just say outright and unequivocally that something is silly. If this logo redesign wasn't absurd, nothing is.
It’s interesting to contrast this with the same company that had the awareness to recognize that basically no one ever types out “Mountain Dew” in its entirety and adopted the _de facto_ name it had acquired in the new millennium: mtn dew.
I agree that brand and marketing is of paramount importance here. But to say this is sophisticated and well-thought is a stretch. It's funny precisely for its lack of sophistication, for how many millions of dollars and countless hours were spent creating something that lacks real value, that's crafted together with the well-meaning exuberance of a teenager trying to look "deep" or earn brownie points.
I think the sophistication is lacking in the criticisms voiced in the comments.
Regardless of the excessive & laughable b.s. factor of this high level design concept document, the proposal meets its brief: design a rebranding strategy that can be used in 2d, 3d, kiosks, blah, etc. as required, without each needing their own design proposal.
So this designer latched onto geometric features of original pepsi logos, extracted some pattern, adjusted the sizing using golden ratio (thus the art history tour), and then went on to apply it to various use cases.
So maybe the design sucks, or possibly you can think of a more sophisticated approach to providing what is effectively a meta-design for a product suite, but this fairly simple approach that is proposed can in fact satisfy the design brief, in a fairly simple manner. Simple is good, right?
LOL, this is not "sophistication", this is bullshit.
A million(s?) dollar study for a global brand is justified by things like:
* Research to see if the brand logos/names are misunderstood or offensive for a particular market/culture.
* Research regarding brand recognition before/after the proposed changes.
* A lot of design/thought behind how the brand will look in the many communication channels/products that it owns.
There's nothing even close to that in this document. Actually, the first time I saw it posted I thought it was a joke from some internet troll, but no, it turned out to be the real thing.
It doesnt matter. It’s all freestyling. All the wild bullshit in the document is there because some pepsi execs reacted to it positively so they went all in on that. Then the document becomes infamous so they will say it was purposely nuts and use it for their own marketing.
These things are done for the execs not consumers. Same goes for Tropicana.
> Research to see if the brand logos/names are misunderstood or offensive for a particular market/culture.
Can verify this is highly important. E.g. using the letters 'Af' as a prefix for a product marketed in Africa. Turns out that is a very offensive word.
Metrics to drive up numbers are the way forward. You need to test theories and prove them with data and experiments. THIS is what is expected in a report; and I see nothing I expect in this report.
Everything you see here is NOT sophistication. It has no science it's just an illusion.
The use of geometry and technical jargon gives the illusion of legitimacy however this stuff is no more legit then the word 'science' in 'scientology'. Which means that exactly like scientology, the content is illegitimate but borrows vocabulary from legitimate fields like "science" to make it seem real.
The use of analogies like DNA help people form connections with irrelevant things and these analogies don't actually communicate any new information. They serve to create a feeling of catharsis when you realize that there is a connection, but the connection is actually worthless. You learn nothing new.
Take the analogy: "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." The quote is worthless. You already know life is random. You already know chocolate boxes are random. A comparison is made and a new connection is formed in your brain. But is there actually any new information here? No. It's a trick to make you think the quote is profound when it is really a bunch of mundane stuff you already know.
You've been bamboozled, along with every exec that fell for this report. Possibly the person who wrote this report tricked himself as well.
Yes, though I get the feeling that being uncertain about the precise quantum of caramels versus mint cremes isn't exactly the point Forrest Gump was trying to make.
(And though I have absolutely no idea, one might suspect that modern boxes of supermarket chocolate are assembled by machine and all contain a constant, predetermined number of each type.)
It's from the US. Sees candy boxes are loaded with random chocolates and you won't know what the chocolates contain until you put one in your mouth.
The quote was made famous by an old US movie starring Tom Hanks. The movie is called Forrest Gump. Fittingly, the character who said that quote is mentally challenged.
Yes, I saw Forrest Gump when it was in cinemas. I do understand the theoretical concept of a boutique, hand-selected tray of chocolates which one cannot guess until after they're opened. It's just not something I've personally experienced.
I always fall back to the Dropbox show and tell post on HN and the iPod is lame slashdot meme as a point to everyone on my team because it reinforces that the building part is just one aspect of a business.
I can laugh at this as agency nonsense with the rest of the crowd, and I think some of it may be warranted. But, it is still ultimately how business works insofar as brand matters, small tweaks to brand can have huge ripple effects; mightily so when the product is the brand, and disregarding anything brand or marketing related is foolhardy.
Nearly agree -- you would want the level of sophistication that this pretends to have. That it tricked management into thinking it has? (pretty damning if so)
I agree that design is far more complicated than most developers realize, but I'd be careful to avoid mistaking detailed explanations for accurate explanations, and heavily discussed topics for usefully discussed topics.
Most of my BFA is in graphic design and it's not my only art and design education, so I'm pretty well-versed in artsy fartsy Bauhausian high-concept visual communication. From the very first days as a Freshmen you start with exercises like finding as many ways as you can to create a palpable sense of tension with only two black squares on a white background by changing the scale and placement, or making two identically colored swatches look like two different colors by placing them on a field of a different color. Professors deliberately don't give you a set guidelines in these exercises because the artistic roots of design don't work that way— you have to understand the way visual components work together on a visceral level before you can effectively reason about them... even pretty straightforward things like effectively setting paragraphs of text or kerning letters can be pretty nebulous, and that's much more straightforward than at abstract logo design.
Could you imagine the pressure of being the art director wielding those nebulous and subjective processes revamp a worldwide household name in one of the most image-focused markets to ever exist? Or being the executive with zero domain knowledge tasked with evaluating the work of this firm? And while the early parts of the process can be subjective, there are vastly more wrong answers than right ones when it comes time to reveal your final product.
This tension means selling your vision is just as much a part of the design process as creating it, and that's a tough job. Check out this 27 minute long pitch film legendary designer Saul Bass made to sell his rebranding of Ma Bell:
That was a huge initiative and it required a lot of explanation— not just explanation of individual decisions and the reasoning behind them, but explaining how he saw the context of the company, all its individual parts, and how people perceived them before deciding how he was going to affect the changes he was hired to affect. But it's all very, very digestible because he's a designer and that's what designers do. They figure out how to take complex or nebulous ideas and concepts and efficiently and effectively communicate them (usually) visually.
And while some of this breathless report makes good sense, much is far from digestible. Parts of it brought to mind this famous Francis Ford Coppola quote:
"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane."
It dabbles in bits of knowledge most folks would consider obscure, presents not-obviously-useful conclusions based on them and then wraps the whole burrito up in a cloak of grandiosity. I mean, when someone places the theoretical framework of a corporate identity revamp on a timeline with some of humanity's most significant achievements, you better strap on your bullshit-proof vest. It seems more designed to make readers feel insecure about not connecting the dots (or maybe zillions of circles) and therefore less likely to confidently push back. I'm really not sure how else the assertion that a circle trisected by two very deliberately placed, but relatively straightforward lines could even subconsciously conceptually intersect with the earth's magnetic field. 90% of that study of perimeter oscillations was psuedo-analytical pointless bullshit.
This sort of thing annoys the hell out of me because it reinforces the view of design as entirely subjective fluff propped up with bullshit when most professional design is actually pretty well reasoned.
1. A link is posted to HN whose content can easily be made fun of, because it appears bizarre without context.
2. People on HN jump at the opportunity to make fun of said link so they have something to take a dump on. It’s a wonderful ego-trip. They cannot get enough of it. Most of those who do not need the ego-trip to feel better about themselves usually move along without comment.
3. Comments like yours which are trying to be curious instead of mocking are “raining on their party”, i.e., ruining their ego-trip.
4. Instead of engaging with you on a level of thoughtful discussion, i.e., “let’s explore why such a bizarre document exists instead of just mocking it because there is nothing to be gained by doing that”, such commenters are more than happy to take a dump on your comment too.
Instead of engaging with your comment in its entirety, they will nit pick on the fact that your comment features the word “sophisticated” and base their entire response on that. Anything to keep the ego-trip and judgement going.
And if this wasn’t spot on already: those taking a dump do so with the most recent design critique that most resonated on HN, hence the dozen or so comments I found on my way to this one bemoaning “sans serif” as if it’s some newfangled design trend and not the font style they’ve most commonly encountered on screen for 30 years.
In general you might be right. But let’s be honest – in this case, despite any amount of context, respect, critical thinking or benefit of the doubt, the content of the link is still just stupid. No way around it.
Now granted, there’s a lot of ignorance, also in this thread, as to why companies develop elaborate philosophies behind their brands to an extent which seems far-fetched for the average person. But it’s also true that in the marketing field, especially on the higher levels, it’s really easy to start bullshitting. And this document is not only a great example of this, it’s an example dialed up to 11.
I agree with you that content which is presented “to be laughed at” inherently spawns some degree of non-productive, toxic discussion. But I also believe that we should never not call out bullshit when we see it.
I've worked in small and big design shops. When done right, the process should make sense to a layperson, like you're respecting their intelligence.
This Pepsi rebrand farce feels more like The Emperor's New Clothes. My guess, and someone with more knowledge can absolutely correct me, is that whatever agency bid for the job, they knew they were basically milking Pepsi for every penny they could, and it was pure greed. And in order to justify the utterly exorbitant estimate, they pulled so much bullshit out of their asses hoping to completely overwhelm the clients and utterly baffle and confuse them and make them feel too stupid to even ask about anything.
Basically, design process should make sense and be understandable to the average empathetic, intelligent business owners.
When done right, the process should make sense to a layperson
Yes, absolutely. A company I worked for paid big money for a design firm to do a brand makeover.
The head of the design firm cautioned our CEO: "If we do this right, the result will not be mindblowing to you. In fact, your reaction might be 'duh - that's really obvious.' Because you already know who you are."
(paraphrased)
I really liked that sentiment. I thought that company did a great job, both on the brand identity itself and on the communication.
Having done some identity work, some stuff is done on purpose and some stuff is justified post-hoc to make the pitch better.
“It looks nice” doesn’t play all that well, and doesn’t give you much protection from a decision maker who (incorrectly) says “I think my idea looks nicer”.
This is not representative of all design experiences though, I’m sure.
The "Creation of Identity: Gravitational Pull" page is always good for a laugh
Typical Light Path > Typical Shopping Aisle
Light Path with Gravitational Pull > Gravitational Pull of Pepsi
Relativity of Space and Time > Pepsi Proposition / Pepsi Aisle
Former Pepsi CEO Thomas Rattigan ran Commodore Computer for a bit; former Pepsi President John Sculley ran Apple Computer. So there's a certain link to computing, for some unknown reason
pepsi. I thought at the time that this 'leaked document' was a brilliant piece of gorilla marketing. It was making an internet meme before they were ubiquitous, and we're still sharing it and laughing about it today. pepsi. contributing to brand omni presence pepsi.
I wonder what was created first - the agency creating the new logo (and then backing into the justification for it), or did the justification for it actually come first & that lead the agency down the path to how the logo was ultimately created.
A funny parody song of this presentation by the legendary Neil Cicierega (potter puppet pals, ultimate battle of ultimate destiny, brodyquest, mouth sounds, etc…)
Worth mentioning that this is the same design company that blew $35MM on a terrible redesign of Tropicana Orange Juice, which they reverted back within a couple days (but kept the mock orange cap)
I see high level design docs like this on occasion. I decided I am not qualified to comment, but my opinion is very polar. Either it is all a very expensive pile of poop or brilliance and design beyond my understanding. When looked upon at a distance I cannot discern which opinion is correct.
The vast majority of this strategy document is ridiculous drivel, written to sound profound but conveying no meaning. One early tipoff is the nonsensical timeline on page 6 -- it's basically just rattling off random bits of art history with no relation to the brand or the proposed strategy.
I'm guessing the guy who made this spent years working for an art degree, getting shackled with decades of debt in the process, only to find that it's nearly impossible to get work as an artist doing anything meaningful so he had to get a shitty 9-5 at a marketing firm and while his dreams of being a true artist have been crushed years ago he just wanted to do something with even just a little of what he learned while studying what he loved.
As far as I can tell marketing is a very expensive pile of poop used to dress up some uncomfortable underlying truths about very real and unfortunate vulnerabilities we have as humans. It's also one of the few places where artists can reliably make money.
The result is that a lot of creative and talented people are putting out some beautiful, powerful, and entertaining works which are ultimately used to lie and to psychologically manipulate the masses in order to shape their views and extract money from them.
I'm wholly in favour of artists getting paid work, but isn't there a vastly inefficient layer of design 'consultancy' that sits in between them, effectively wasting money to turn out bullshit for corporate bullshit (mostly marketing) departments?
How many more artists could be paid and paid more by cutting out the bullshit merchants both inside and outside companies?
This Pepsi redesign is just particularly (spectacularly) bad. There are plenty of brand briefs which are intelligent, strategic and grounded in reality.
English Premier League had a fantastic rebrand: where they selected a nice color set that stood out (it was "their" color set), new font, new visual style guide including new animations, new logo (that causes some controversy but it prints well). They also made a piece of music that makes you feel that you just watched something great/fantastic/historic - even if the match itself wasnt good.
Most of the time modernizing the logotypes and fonts to make them simpler does not work, but here someone came with a coherent strategy that simply looks good and is distinct enough.
The lid really is great. But yeah that's a drastic change (new logo, new typography, new slogan, new image, new lid). They always have to throw the baby with the bath water and be radically modern with every detail.
Reddit's new design went heavy on modern/JS styling and not the raw simple HN-style text-heavy interface. They should have focused on loading the links->comments, pictures, video as quick as possible. They got the comments page to load async but video is broken and RES plugin does inline image/video loading way better. Everything else is a step back or sideways.
Tangentially Reddit seems determined to make me stop visiting it. When they finally kill old. I won't anymore. The new reddit mobile web experience is incoherent, I get that they're pushing the app but no thanks.
Came across a thread yesterday on Reddit on how ads on Reddit can now be no longer downvoted. That's an indication of where they are headed and who they prioritise ...
Not so sure about the lid: if this is indeed a true quality product leading the market, why does it need this gimmick? You'd rather expect a basic, functional statement. Together with the nondescript sans-serif type, this gives the appeal of a me-too product that would want such a gimmick in order to raise awareness.
I don’t know how management allowed them to kill the metaphor of the straw tapping an orange. It’s a good metaphor for the product's “fresh” marketing message (putting aside the “flavor packets” thing.
The one thing I think the new design had right was the lighter green for the type. That’s about it.
The straw in orange is also a fun and friendly image, without going overboard. It invites people to "solve" the visual equation. Straw + orange = fresh juice. A clever design for young and old. Amazing they replaced it with a boring glass of OJ.
Replacing the horizontal convex "Tropicana" with the straight vertical and using a more serious font, was another blunder.
They probably just got lost in many design reviews. At the end they couln't "see" the designs anymore. Also their test group was probably biased: They probably used the same guys to review all design iterations, so their opinion developed along with each iteration.
You guessed it. Arnell Group that did the new Pepsi logo.
"The campaign, which carries the theme “Squeeze it’s a natural,” was created by Arnell in New York, part of the Omnicom Group. Arnell also created the new version of the Tropicana packaging.
“Tropicana is doing exactly what they should be doing,” Peter Arnell, chairman and chief creative officer at Arnell, said in a separate telephone interview on Friday.
“I’m incredibly surprised by the reaction,” he added, referring to the complaints about his agency’s design work, but “I’m glad Tropicana is getting this kind of attention.”
Their new design was just yet another example of how the currently in vogue "minimalism everywhere" design aesthetic sucks. The Tropicana case study is such a great example because the effects were so drastic, but only really because there were easily substituted goods - consumers basically thought the carton was just "generic store brand OJ".
My guess is that other recent brand redesigns to this boring, same, sans-serif minimalist aesthetic (recent HN article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040506) are just as bad, but with "stickier" products (people aren't likely to leave Google or Facebook just because the typography is shittier) the downside is less noticeable.
On that subject, https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ tracks the desecration of all these once colorful, beautiful, expressive logos into this new bland style that's in vogue.
Saying that this guy's designs were terrible therefore all modern design is terrible is like saying all children's TV presenters are pedophiles (apologies I know that's an extreme analogy).
The truth is that the guy behind this design agency is not a good designer at all and his career seems to have been driven by confidence, greed and the incompetence of his clients. It's a sample of one. He's the Jimmy Saville of bad design
Which is why I linked the related recent HN post about tons of different brands, across tech and fashion, that wiped out any trace of their individuality for bold, sans-serif logos.
I agree, I think this designer is just a particularly shitty designer, but he's a shitty designer that's just copying the broader trend of minimalist design laziness. I think the last section in that linked HN article (https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-...) perfectly points out what went wrong in the Tropicana redesign as well:
> There’s nothing bad in wanting your logo to look simpler, better, mobile-ready, or universal enough to appeal to the broadest possible audience.
> But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
> Shoot for simplicity and legibility, but keep your distinguishing features. Don’t throw away what the brand has been working on for decades.
> Otherwise, you may end up in a situation where you could slap any logo on any product and hardly anyone would notice a difference:
PepsiCo Inc (PEP, Nasdaq) isn't merely a beverage company - as explained in this strategy document - it is a space company. The Pepsi Universe, with respect to its 8 light year characteristic length, reflects the scale of the total addressable market (TAM) that PepsiCo can expand into.
Noted short-seller and equity valuation skeptic Jim Chanos once described the TAM of space companies as infinite, because space itself is infinite. This pessimistic take anchors our low-end fair value estimate of PEP to $infinity / share. Since PEP currently trades at around $170 / share, we believe there is considerable upside to the long term buy and hold investor.
It looks like lots was going on at the Arnell group at this time. In this article it even quotes Arnell as saying this work for Pepsi in OP as "Bullshit"
Quote from the article about the "Breathtaking Design Strategy" document:
> February 2009: Arnell sold Pepsi a pretentious, mostly made-up brand ideology document linking Pepsi to the Mona Lisa, De[s]cartes and Hinduism, as part of a successful logo redesign. Price: $1 million, reportedly.
Remember that John Sculley has been the only one who could. Kinda. Sculley invented the Pepsi Challenge, (and infamously failed it on camera) signed Michael Jackson to promote and went off to Cupertino and did some interesting things there too. But Coca-Cola Company had Michael Bay and still does. If you're dealing in visual impact imagination Michael Bay's a trump card.
Check it out @ 2:11:28 ; the crowd goes wild for Pepsi:
"Out there
It's a Pepsi universe
Thriving since time began
On a steady course
At a steady pace
Bringing pleasure everywhere
All through time and space
And up here
In the Pepsi enterprise
We have one perfect plan:
To bring Pepsi refreshment to all constellations
And if anyone can succeed
We know we can
It's all there on history's pages
One refreshment through the ages
[Spoken] Pepsi is the universal refreshment, but has it always been that way, Professor?
[Spoken] As far as I can remember.
We're proud that the Pepsi enterprise
Never, ever stands still
'Cause the company's working
Side by side with our bottlers
And if anyone can succeed
We know we WILL!
"
276 comments
[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] thread"a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
My only take away from this post is that I like the 1962 skeuomorphic Pepsi logo with the bottlecap.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming “Tactics include editing company logos to critique the respective companies, products or concepts they represent[...]”
1. https://www.adbusters.org/
https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke/
if you were running a multi-billion dollar sugar water company whose main moat is the brand, and spent hundreds of millions on ads each year as one of the key line items in the budget, you too would want this level of sophistication and thought put into a brand refresh. Probably even more.
And you can imagine that this document was debated for weeks or months by the highest level executives as well as whole departments of marketers. They probably had multiple documents like this from multiple agencies. With that level of internal debate, all the granular side-by-side process diagrams are a necessary part of the UX here, to guide along the audience that only sees the pdf and can't talk to the agency designers.
It's just that the effort is making something completely ridiculous
It’s interesting to contrast this with the same company that had the awareness to recognize that basically no one ever types out “Mountain Dew” in its entirety and adopted the _de facto_ name it had acquired in the new millennium: mtn dew.
I agree though that the HN crowd as a CEO would want lots of effort to study how to make the most recognizable and liked brand.
Regardless of the excessive & laughable b.s. factor of this high level design concept document, the proposal meets its brief: design a rebranding strategy that can be used in 2d, 3d, kiosks, blah, etc. as required, without each needing their own design proposal.
So this designer latched onto geometric features of original pepsi logos, extracted some pattern, adjusted the sizing using golden ratio (thus the art history tour), and then went on to apply it to various use cases.
So maybe the design sucks, or possibly you can think of a more sophisticated approach to providing what is effectively a meta-design for a product suite, but this fairly simple approach that is proposed can in fact satisfy the design brief, in a fairly simple manner. Simple is good, right?
I think we can all agree this PDF goes out of its way to convince the reader that it's anything but simple.
- Pepsi DNA
- Pepsi Energy Fields
- The Pepsi Universe
It's all gold, to be honest. I love this document.
A million(s?) dollar study for a global brand is justified by things like:
There's nothing even close to that in this document. Actually, the first time I saw it posted I thought it was a joke from some internet troll, but no, it turned out to be the real thing.Second of all, do you actually think anyone who reads this document will associate positive feelings with Pepsi?
All it's making me think is "Man, those Coke ads with the polar bears were pretty cool."
These things are done for the execs not consumers. Same goes for Tropicana.
Can verify this is highly important. E.g. using the letters 'Af' as a prefix for a product marketed in Africa. Turns out that is a very offensive word.
https://dsae.co.za/entry/af/e00076
Everything you see here is NOT sophistication. It has no science it's just an illusion.
The use of geometry and technical jargon gives the illusion of legitimacy however this stuff is no more legit then the word 'science' in 'scientology'. Which means that exactly like scientology, the content is illegitimate but borrows vocabulary from legitimate fields like "science" to make it seem real.
The use of analogies like DNA help people form connections with irrelevant things and these analogies don't actually communicate any new information. They serve to create a feeling of catharsis when you realize that there is a connection, but the connection is actually worthless. You learn nothing new.
Take the analogy: "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." The quote is worthless. You already know life is random. You already know chocolate boxes are random. A comparison is made and a new connection is formed in your brain. But is there actually any new information here? No. It's a trick to make you think the quote is profound when it is really a bunch of mundane stuff you already know.
You've been bamboozled, along with every exec that fell for this report. Possibly the person who wrote this report tricked himself as well.
(And though I have absolutely no idea, one might suspect that modern boxes of supermarket chocolate are assembled by machine and all contain a constant, predetermined number of each type.)
The quote was made famous by an old US movie starring Tom Hanks. The movie is called Forrest Gump. Fittingly, the character who said that quote is mentally challenged.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJh59vZ8ccc
I can laugh at this as agency nonsense with the rest of the crowd, and I think some of it may be warranted. But, it is still ultimately how business works insofar as brand matters, small tweaks to brand can have huge ripple effects; mightily so when the product is the brand, and disregarding anything brand or marketing related is foolhardy.
Most of my BFA is in graphic design and it's not my only art and design education, so I'm pretty well-versed in artsy fartsy Bauhausian high-concept visual communication. From the very first days as a Freshmen you start with exercises like finding as many ways as you can to create a palpable sense of tension with only two black squares on a white background by changing the scale and placement, or making two identically colored swatches look like two different colors by placing them on a field of a different color. Professors deliberately don't give you a set guidelines in these exercises because the artistic roots of design don't work that way— you have to understand the way visual components work together on a visceral level before you can effectively reason about them... even pretty straightforward things like effectively setting paragraphs of text or kerning letters can be pretty nebulous, and that's much more straightforward than at abstract logo design.
Could you imagine the pressure of being the art director wielding those nebulous and subjective processes revamp a worldwide household name in one of the most image-focused markets to ever exist? Or being the executive with zero domain knowledge tasked with evaluating the work of this firm? And while the early parts of the process can be subjective, there are vastly more wrong answers than right ones when it comes time to reveal your final product.
This tension means selling your vision is just as much a part of the design process as creating it, and that's a tough job. Check out this 27 minute long pitch film legendary designer Saul Bass made to sell his rebranding of Ma Bell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI
That was a huge initiative and it required a lot of explanation— not just explanation of individual decisions and the reasoning behind them, but explaining how he saw the context of the company, all its individual parts, and how people perceived them before deciding how he was going to affect the changes he was hired to affect. But it's all very, very digestible because he's a designer and that's what designers do. They figure out how to take complex or nebulous ideas and concepts and efficiently and effectively communicate them (usually) visually.
And while some of this breathless report makes good sense, much is far from digestible. Parts of it brought to mind this famous Francis Ford Coppola quote:
"We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane."
It dabbles in bits of knowledge most folks would consider obscure, presents not-obviously-useful conclusions based on them and then wraps the whole burrito up in a cloak of grandiosity. I mean, when someone places the theoretical framework of a corporate identity revamp on a timeline with some of humanity's most significant achievements, you better strap on your bullshit-proof vest. It seems more designed to make readers feel insecure about not connecting the dots (or maybe zillions of circles) and therefore less likely to confidently push back. I'm really not sure how else the assertion that a circle trisected by two very deliberately placed, but relatively straightforward lines could even subconsciously conceptually intersect with the earth's magnetic field. 90% of that study of perimeter oscillations was psuedo-analytical pointless bullshit.
This sort of thing annoys the hell out of me because it reinforces the view of design as entirely subjective fluff propped up with bullshit when most professional design is actually pretty well reasoned.
1. A link is posted to HN whose content can easily be made fun of, because it appears bizarre without context.
2. People on HN jump at the opportunity to make fun of said link so they have something to take a dump on. It’s a wonderful ego-trip. They cannot get enough of it. Most of those who do not need the ego-trip to feel better about themselves usually move along without comment.
3. Comments like yours which are trying to be curious instead of mocking are “raining on their party”, i.e., ruining their ego-trip.
4. Instead of engaging with you on a level of thoughtful discussion, i.e., “let’s explore why such a bizarre document exists instead of just mocking it because there is nothing to be gained by doing that”, such commenters are more than happy to take a dump on your comment too.
Instead of engaging with your comment in its entirety, they will nit pick on the fact that your comment features the word “sophisticated” and base their entire response on that. Anything to keep the ego-trip and judgement going.
Now granted, there’s a lot of ignorance, also in this thread, as to why companies develop elaborate philosophies behind their brands to an extent which seems far-fetched for the average person. But it’s also true that in the marketing field, especially on the higher levels, it’s really easy to start bullshitting. And this document is not only a great example of this, it’s an example dialed up to 11.
I agree with you that content which is presented “to be laughed at” inherently spawns some degree of non-productive, toxic discussion. But I also believe that we should never not call out bullshit when we see it.
Yes "sophistication, data-science, a/b testing, consumer science(the real type)". None of that is in the pdf.
Consumer research existed long before IT started A/B testing everything.
Can anyone tell me if there is even an iota of meaning in the design process?
This Pepsi rebrand farce feels more like The Emperor's New Clothes. My guess, and someone with more knowledge can absolutely correct me, is that whatever agency bid for the job, they knew they were basically milking Pepsi for every penny they could, and it was pure greed. And in order to justify the utterly exorbitant estimate, they pulled so much bullshit out of their asses hoping to completely overwhelm the clients and utterly baffle and confuse them and make them feel too stupid to even ask about anything.
Basically, design process should make sense and be understandable to the average empathetic, intelligent business owners.
The head of the design firm cautioned our CEO: "If we do this right, the result will not be mindblowing to you. In fact, your reaction might be 'duh - that's really obvious.' Because you already know who you are."
(paraphrased)
I really liked that sentiment. I thought that company did a great job, both on the brand identity itself and on the communication.
“It looks nice” doesn’t play all that well, and doesn’t give you much protection from a decision maker who (incorrectly) says “I think my idea looks nicer”.
This is not representative of all design experiences though, I’m sure.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispepsi
It's a loan word from Spanish meaning "little war".
I wonder what was created first - the agency creating the new logo (and then backing into the justification for it), or did the justification for it actually come first & that lead the agency down the path to how the logo was ultimately created.
https://youtu.be/fu3ETgAvQrw
https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...
The vast majority of this strategy document is ridiculous drivel, written to sound profound but conveying no meaning. One early tipoff is the nonsensical timeline on page 6 -- it's basically just rattling off random bits of art history with no relation to the brand or the proposed strategy.
The result is that a lot of creative and talented people are putting out some beautiful, powerful, and entertaining works which are ultimately used to lie and to psychologically manipulate the masses in order to shape their views and extract money from them.
How many more artists could be paid and paid more by cutting out the bullshit merchants both inside and outside companies?
Most of the time modernizing the logotypes and fonts to make them simpler does not work, but here someone came with a coherent strategy that simply looks good and is distinct enough.
https://medium.com/look-and-logo/a-closer-look-at-the-premie...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px3NqI7-v50
Reddit's new design went heavy on modern/JS styling and not the raw simple HN-style text-heavy interface. They should have focused on loading the links->comments, pictures, video as quick as possible. They got the comments page to load async but video is broken and RES plugin does inline image/video loading way better. Everything else is a step back or sideways.
The one thing I think the new design had right was the lighter green for the type. That’s about it.
Replacing the horizontal convex "Tropicana" with the straight vertical and using a more serious font, was another blunder.
You guessed it. Arnell Group that did the new Pepsi logo.
"The campaign, which carries the theme “Squeeze it’s a natural,” was created by Arnell in New York, part of the Omnicom Group. Arnell also created the new version of the Tropicana packaging.
“Tropicana is doing exactly what they should be doing,” Peter Arnell, chairman and chief creative officer at Arnell, said in a separate telephone interview on Friday.
“I’m incredibly surprised by the reaction,” he added, referring to the complaints about his agency’s design work, but “I’m glad Tropicana is getting this kind of attention.”
Full article about the botched campaign: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/media/23adcol.ht...
My guess is that other recent brand redesigns to this boring, same, sans-serif minimalist aesthetic (recent HN article, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040506) are just as bad, but with "stickier" products (people aren't likely to leave Google or Facebook just because the typography is shittier) the downside is less noticeable.
The truth is that the guy behind this design agency is not a good designer at all and his career seems to have been driven by confidence, greed and the incompetence of his clients. It's a sample of one. He's the Jimmy Saville of bad design
I agree, I think this designer is just a particularly shitty designer, but he's a shitty designer that's just copying the broader trend of minimalist design laziness. I think the last section in that linked HN article (https://velvetshark.com/articles/why-do-brands-change-their-...) perfectly points out what went wrong in the Tropicana redesign as well:
> There’s nothing bad in wanting your logo to look simpler, better, mobile-ready, or universal enough to appeal to the broadest possible audience.
> But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
> Shoot for simplicity and legibility, but keep your distinguishing features. Don’t throw away what the brand has been working on for decades.
> Otherwise, you may end up in a situation where you could slap any logo on any product and hardly anyone would notice a difference:
Their packaging was absolutely genius because it instantly stood out on every shelf.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Da0flNiWkAAUda7.jpg
Other than the font it seems like everyone wants to got that way, of course if you move with the crowd you can't stand out from it.
Noted short-seller and equity valuation skeptic Jim Chanos once described the TAM of space companies as infinite, because space itself is infinite. This pessimistic take anchors our low-end fair value estimate of PEP to $infinity / share. Since PEP currently trades at around $170 / share, we believe there is considerable upside to the long term buy and hold investor.
It looks like lots was going on at the Arnell group at this time. In this article it even quotes Arnell as saying this work for Pepsi in OP as "Bullshit"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-the-firing-of-weird-design-...
You can't make this stuff up
> February 2009: Arnell sold Pepsi a pretentious, mostly made-up brand ideology document linking Pepsi to the Mona Lisa, De[s]cartes and Hinduism, as part of a successful logo redesign. Price: $1 million, reportedly.
https://www.fastcompany.com/1661802/the-secret-to-peter-arne...
I'm inspired by Jello Biafra's H2K2 keynote where he brought along a vinyl record of corporate training songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foFCd5xOrh0
Check it out @ 2:11:28 ; the crowd goes wild for Pepsi:
"Out there It's a Pepsi universe Thriving since time began
On a steady course At a steady pace Bringing pleasure everywhere All through time and space
And up here In the Pepsi enterprise We have one perfect plan: To bring Pepsi refreshment to all constellations
And if anyone can succeed We know we can It's all there on history's pages One refreshment through the ages
[Spoken] Pepsi is the universal refreshment, but has it always been that way, Professor? [Spoken] As far as I can remember.
We're proud that the Pepsi enterprise Never, ever stands still 'Cause the company's working Side by side with our bottlers And if anyone can succeed We know we WILL! "