What Happened To Branding?

Today was the rare type of day when I have a sort of vision, a clairvoyant look into the world. In return, I get to either create something awesome, go through an anxiety attack, or both. Today, I had both.

Posted on my new blog, Larry West Productions: The Blog, this is a snippet of my article on branding.

Sometimes I feel older than I should.

This isn't a figure of speech your about to read, nor am I over-simplifying what happened. I woke up this morning, eyes aching from the attempts to open them after basically rubbing away the protective layer on them last night and then having it grow back this morning. After I got both eyes open, watching TV, I realized something: There is no branding anymore.

I was watching "Morning Joe" on MSNBC when that hit me. I was watching the logo in the background as it was displayed on a screen and that made me think about what it meant, which, really, was nothing. It's a sloppy logo. Joe Scarbrough is a straight-laced Republican and the logo is a liberal-minded, coffee-shop logo. It doesn't work. It's not a brand. The show was slapped together after the Don Imus thing and they never made the logo work for the show. Joe just doesn't look good against the logo, against this "brand", and he always looks awkward.

Then I started to think about my logo and branding.

There's a lot more to this, including Spongebob Squarepants, Apple, and Virigns! Enjoy!

My Pepsi Redesign Attempt

OK, so since October a lot of people have been up in arms over the new Pepsi logo and have done everything to belittle it. From comparing it to ass cracks, Korean Air, and even the Obama campaign logo (which was idiotic since the Obama logo was compared to the Pepsi Logo as early as February of 2008!) I got sick of it!

I didn't mind the alteration myself; the tilt to make it a "smile" is cute and clever. The Pepsi can was becoming a lot more cluttered lately, with really crappy designs hogging up a ton of room better left to, say, breathing room. The thing became a Photoshop nightmare, so cleaning it up to a more flat vector-esq thing again is a great thing!

Now, my problem is simple: The PACKAGING is generic! It's bland, boring, uses a generic font that's unappealing for something that's supposed to have impact... it isn't "PEPSI" anymore! It's "....pepsi....", a timid little thing that is afraid of being on the shelf and wants to be second-banana to Coca-Cola.

So when the new ad campaign came out, I was kinda glad to see the logo with a font that was better! The font used in the advertising actually has some weight to it and some impact. It isn't thing and kinda airy and thin; it's bold and strong! That, to me, is what is missing in the new Pepsi packaging and the font.

So I found a font close to the one used in the ads, made a few adjustments to it, and added a background that I thought made it say "POP", or at least "Soda Pop"; I wanted the fact that Pepsi is a large part of POP-Culture to be in it.

This is just me screwing around and actually putting my money where my mouth is.



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