https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...
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.
Their packaging was absolutely genius because it instantly stood out on every shelf.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Da0flNiWkAAUda7.jpg
Other than the font it seems like everyone wants to got that way, of course if you move with the crowd you can't stand out from it.
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
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:
The one thing I think the new design had right was the lighter green for the type. That’s about it.
Replacing the horizontal convex "Tropicana" with the straight vertical and using a more serious font, was another blunder.
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.
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.”
Full article about the botched campaign: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/media/23adcol.ht...
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.
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.
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://medium.com/look-and-logo/a-closer-look-at-the-premie...