reminds me of the now-infamous Pepsi "Breathtaking" design document https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
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.
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.
[1] https://adage.com/article/agency-news/breathtaking-word-purp...
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/1160304/pepsi-logo-design-brief-...
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...