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)
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:
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...