Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

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The PDF linked in the article [0] is pure gold.

> C. The investment in our DNA leads to breakthrough innovation and allows us to move out of the traditional linear system and into the future

> BREATHTAKING is a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating an authentic Constitution of Design.

> B. Magnetic Fields: Magnetic fields exert forces on inner and outer surfaces of the Earth.

> B. Pepsi Energy Fields: Symmetrical energy fields are in balance.

> C. Magnetic Dynamics: Magnetic field are impacted by sun radiation and wind motion.

> C. The Pepsi Globe Dynamics: Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.

Also, take a look at the deconstruction of the old Pepsi logos into arbitrary ellipses ("Perimeter Oscillations") on pages 8ff.

It gets increasingly surreal ("Light Path with Gravitational Pull" vs "Gravitational Pull of Pepsi", "Relativity of Space and Time" vs "Pepsi Proposition / Pepsi Aisle", difference between a "Pepsi Galaxy" and a "Pepsi Universe", ...) on the last pages.

Dimensionalize exponentially.

[0] https://jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pepsi_grav...

This PDF is hilarious. How can anyone get away with so much bullshit is beyond me.

I can't tell if this is real or not. It feels like the Turbo Encabulator of design.

It's one step away from VX junkies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/

They need to justify the spend for the execs with something that looks like it took more than 100 man hours to work out.

What I'm curious about is how much these design agencies recycle their stock bullshit for different clients. Just swap in different logos. Restyle with the new palette of pretentiously named colors. Apply the new commissioned font and voila, you have a rebranding document the C levels can feel chuffed about.

Money laundering? Tax breaks? Not in this case but as a general rule where there is a big, weird, transfer of money

I would pay a million dollars for this as a piece of performance modern art.

Because no one is really reading it. It's not there to be read. It's there to exist. You can't pay 7 figures for a simple image file. No. There must be "a reason" for that logo to look like that. So you get someone to drum up a few pages of bullshit to justify paying 7 figures for it.

And the sad thing is that everyone knows it's bullshit on some level. But I'm not paying 7 figures without getting handed that bullshit, and you're not charging 7 figures without being able to create it.

I just skimmed through the PDF (not that it has much content). I can't believe someone paid for that. Clearly I'm in the wrong business.

Make no mistake, it's a lot of work to get to the point where you get to be the one to charge Pepsi a million dollars for a logo.

Creating the bullshit in the PDF is the easy bit, getting someone to pay for it is the hard bit.

That document is astounding. My jaw dropped, literally, on some pages.

> "Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity."

This is where I lost it.

And that's when they literally started building a "tiny brain, normal brain, enlightened brain, galaxy brain, universe brain" meme, out of freaking Pepsi logos.

I can't possibly be the only one here who understands what they were getting at, right? It seems silly but it's pretty obvious that they're just trying to get at the intentions and associations behind their aesthetic decisions. It's only as absurd as human pattern-seeking behavior is in general.

Oh, I definitely get what they're getting at. They just wrapped it up in way, way more window-dressing than was remotely justified. It makes the whole thing look farcical.

The pdf author thinks a light year is a speed and the universe expands at f(x) = e^x. Someone was copying stuff they didn't understand off the internet.

> I can't possibly be the only one here who understands what they were getting at, right?

It was both accurate and profound.

Unfortunately the parts that were accurate were trivial and the parts that were profound were incorrect.

Well, you could take that literally, or you could take that as a marketing draft, where every idea written in the PDF would later be used as part of advertising.

Bullshit is what makes good video adverts rememberable. It just has to be unique bullshit.

My favorite is:

    C. The Pepsi Globe Dynamics
         Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.

I didn't even know those words were allowed to be together.

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