Wow, that is epic. I'm not sure what the hell to make of it, but it kind of reads like one of those net.kook manifestos about how to create a perpetual motion machine or something like that. But more polished.
It reminds me of something food startup Hampton Creek did when VCs and reporters came to visit- they would have their scientists fire up dry ice machines and do fake "cool looking experiments" for no purpose other than to look impressive:
> When investors, clients, or media visited the company, some scientists would be asked to run experiments on cool-looking machines or use liquid nitrogen to dramatic effect — even if it had nothing to do with their work, a former employee says.
> It was all to create an appearance of a hardworking lab, even though it distracted from the actual research that needed to be done, former employees said.
Ugh, that article is so sad. I really wanted to believe the hype about Hampton Creek.
It seemed like they were doing something truly revolutionary with the potential to drastically reduce human consumption of eggs. (This can only be a good thing for anyone with a concern for animal welfare.)
The article suggests their core product is just mayonnaise made with an already-commonplace vegan food additive. They outsourced the development of it, and don't even understand the science of how it works.
Is there a new generation of entrepreneurs who have realised their path to riches is to found a PR machine masquerading as a tech company?
> Is there a new generation of entrepreneurs who have realised their path to riches is to found a PR machine masquerading as a tech company?
...Yes.
I wouldnt call it "new" or a "generation" but rather there are always those who can get by with hype and no substance. Nothing new but the amount of people doing it goes through boom and bust cycles like everything else.
I guess its hard to deal with that, at the end of the day, you are just trying to exploit subconscious survival instincts to usurp the rational mind to get people buy things they do not want to buy.
I think you'll find that the NeXT logo was designed in a similar fashion, and that many high end brands get this kind of input into their logos and branding.
Call it snake oil? Probably, but at least a multi billion dollar brand can answer the question "Why does the swirl look like that?".
Just give me the multi-million dollar logo contract so I may give you the snake-oil design document which justifies my multi-million dollar fee for the snake-oil design document!
Peter Arnell is known for this, just search his name on google and you'll get lots of colorful articles. The Arnell Group was also behind the Tropicana redesign disaster [1].
Lately, it seems he's been brought aboard by BlackBerry and it's interesting how their instagram page shows the slow change from normal looking ads to just weird abstract black and white crap. [2]
I'd loved to have seen this presentation, and in particular a recording of the Pepsi exec's faces as they decide it's safer to go with the consensus of the group rather than to speak up.
The .PDF metadata says it's from 2008, produced on a Mac running what was then a fairly high-end package (Acrobat Distiller from the InDesign CS3 suite.) Assuming nobody went to the trouble of adding bogus metadata, it's easy to believe that it really came from an ad agency.
Hah, that's pretty mild compared to some of the things I've seen come back from creative agencies.
Sometimes the agencies throw these dud concepts in there to push you to select one of the better concepts they spent more time on. Which makes you wonder what the other concepts were that didn't make it for the new Uber icon.
It's past time to stop calling them "creative agencies." They're "advertisers," "hucksters," or "paid liars," and asking us to call them "creative" was pretty creative.
Even if I had said "Hucksters" then you would have most likely thought of something other than a creative agency. I could probably shave with the amount of edge you've got there.
This is absolutely a higher level of nonsense, but I've seen quite a lot of bullshit people are getting away with in web / social marketing. Basically, nobody in a "creative" agency has any fucking clue how statistics work, so they fudge some numbers and invent interpretations. Customers don't have a clue either, but they're compelled to believe because they spent money on it, and since actual sales data are hard to correlate with particular actions, the agency can extract money from their client as long as the client isn't doing too badly.
It reminds me of an article posted here a month ago[0]. Some juicy quotes: [1].
Similarly, I have rarely met an SEO or social media expert who wasn't full of shit, and I have to deal with these people on a regular basis.
I've read reports with analyses that were blatantly wrong from a statistic or technical perspective, I've had discussions about the value of 'meta keywords' and whatnot where google itself refuted their arguments. And the most 'effective' experts I found were only so because they'd do all sorts of shady things like set up blogs for link juice.
On the other hand, I have met plenty of people with deep knowledge of SEO and social media, but very few of them called themselves primarily experts in this area. Usually they'd be web developers/designers, or small creative studios, or just have some unsexy job description working for a big company.
Except that it wasn't an agency at all. Kalanick headed the redesign himself, despite admitting that he didn't even know what kearning was when he started. From wired:
>>> Most CEOs hire experts—branding agencies that specialize in translating corporate values into fonts and colors—or tap an in-house team. Not Kalanick. For the past three years, he’s worked alongside Uber design director Shalin Amin and a dozen or so others, hammering out ideas from a stuffy space they call the War Room. Along the way, he studied up on concepts ranging from kerning to color palettes. “I didn’t know any of this stuff,” says Kalanick. “I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good.”
> “I didn’t know any of this stuff,” says Kalanick. “I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good.”
Translation: "I don't know anything about this, but I believe it is important, so I want it to be done right... and I somehow think I am the person to do that." This is why we all repair our own cars using hammers and pliers.
I don't frequently wish the loss of a job upon other people, but I dearly hope everyone involved in producing that document was fired for it, because there is not an iota of substance in those pages.
One iota, possibly. The "color theory" section on page 25 is actually halfway reasonable. (I like to imagine the employee working on that part was rolling their eyes wildly at the insanity going on around them.)
I was half-expecting to find something along the lines of "Ignore this /\ (also this \/)" somewhere on that page, as it's the only thing I saw in the whole document that didn't look like it fell out of some broken Markov chain generator.
Actually, I thought that the main concept of a logo that, when printed on a cylinder, had its white line seem to change its shape depending on horizontal angle, was pretty cool. But it was terrible to have to slog through all the other stuff.
My favorite part is when they align the golden ratio to get the white curve "just right"... and then just do a bunch of other random shit w/ the stripe. SCIENCE!
Look at pages 21, 26, 27, I think they pulled in a scientist to help with those... I'm not saying its all science, but part of the BS is trying to be science-y.
Nah. None of that is science; it just has a few sciencey-sounding words in it. My guess would be they were trying to come up with a post-hoc "scientific basis" for their branding decisions?
The last page is particularly awful. Not only does it contain a glaring scientific error ("1 light year = 671 million miles per hour"), but it's completely meaningless from a branding perspective. I mean, what does "dimensionalize exponentially" even mean?
https://people.mozilla.org/~faaborg/files/20090521-firefoxIc...
(Page 26)