Sunday, 2009.Feb.15
New Pepsi Logo: Terrible Mistake or Ingenious Redesign
At the end of 2008, Pepsi came out with new logo:
old logos:
new logo:
As I’m sure you can imagine (and google) this has caused quite a stir among the online community. To summarize, some people thought the change from wave to smile was genius. Others considered the change absolutely pointless and ugly.
- The Dieline wants to know what Pepsi was thinking.
- Kottke.Org wants Pepsi to stop trying to predict the packaging of the future.
- AIGA will keep quite about that logo, as that would be most polite considering their opinion.
- Brand New doesn’t present it’s opinion, but it’s readers have a certain. . . dislike of the logo.
- Trendsetting Design sees the logo as a clinical-medical-waiting-room-mp3-player-packaged-politically-inspired-design.
- Endure Online wants a more unified design through out all of Pepsi’s packaging/branding.
- Before&After provides an indepth analysis and concludes that the design is, while not necessarily a terrible change, certainly won’t help the brand.
- Logo Design Love wonders why they didn’t stick with a design from 1960.
- BevReview doesn’t think the change in design will change their fortunes much.
- Fritinancy likes the logo, but doesn’t like the bottles, the lowercase font change, or the grammatically incorrect advertisments.
- Laughing Lion Design wants some of the older designs brought back.
- Slashfood asks ‘what were they thinking?’
- Advertising Age presents the full scale of opinions while pointing out that, given the cost ($1million for the new logo, and hundreds of millions to replace every old logo) maybe the redesign isn’t worth it.
- A Particular Day doesn’t really want to have an opinion on a soda brand, but can’t decide if the new cans lack or have excess testosterone.
All in all, most people expressing their opinions dislike, but there are people who like it, people who don’t know, and people just questioning the change. Then, more recently,
Arnell, the company that created the logo, released a
pdf detailing the reasons Pepsi chose the logo.
This too caused expression of opinions. Most (everyone) thought the thing was bogus, pretentious, and just a way to make a logo sound impressive.
Personally? I think the smile is splendiferously genius. I like the plain cans with the simple sans-serif font. However, I agree that the off-centered words/logo/calorie count doesn’t work. The ‘si’ on the end is a little lost from the rounded ‘pep’.
What do you guys think?
2009_09_19 Update: I have turned comments off, because this is the post on which i get all my spam. If you have something to tell me, do it on a post not written eight months ago. Thanks.
