Drinking Pepsi off the deep end
Before we get to this Pepsi story (and trust me, it’s a doozy), a quick lesson in logo development: designing the logo is only half the job. The other half is explaining it. Because, more than with any other kind of design project, clients want an objective rationale for your recommendation. Which is understandable—as the ubiquitous visual expression of the brand, the logo is singularly influential in customers’ perceptions. So clients want some reassurance that your design really is the best choice for conveying the brand’s essence. What they would love is some kind of Rosetta Stone to translate the visual into the verbal, so they know without a doubt that green is better than blue, that a circle works better than a square, that a sans serif font is more appropriate than a serif.
Of course, there is no such Rosetta Stone, no objective conversion formula between the linguistic and the artistic. Some part of a logo’s effect will always be subjective. Still, there are some well established precepts you can cite for the client, some research-based tried-and-true correspondences. Like warm colors equal excitement, and cool colors connote sophistication. Sans serif fonts feel more modern, and slanted type suggests speed. There are a few other straightforward generalities you can mention with confidence, but if you keep going much longer, you’ll find yourself in the tall grass, pontificating with increasingly specious-sounding pronouncements that come across more like existentialist philosophy than marketing. It’s not deliberate obfuscation; it’s just the nature of the game. After all, you’re trying to talk about art, which, as they say, is like dancing about architecture.
But this Pepsi thing takes the cake.
As you may or may not have noticed, Pepsi recently undertook a rebranding, and the development of a new logo was part of that effort. Whether you feel good, bad, or indifferent about the result, you have to agree: the new logo is basically a tweak of the old. Same colors, same circular shape, just some subtle changes to give it more of a 3-D look. In presenting this new logo, the agency (the Arnell Group) of course also needed to present its rationale. And for such a high-profile client, you might expect the explanatory prose to get a little purple at times, especially when you have a budget of several hundred million dollars to justify. But would you have expected statements like these? (Which we are privy to thanks to a leaked internal document, as presented on Gawker.)
“The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations.”
“A strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating an authentic Constitution of Design,” including the “Hindu tradition of numerical harmony as spatial organizer.” This historical heritage symposium goes on to name-drop everyone from Euclid and Pythagoras to DaVinci and Descartes, and everything from the Moebius Strip to the Golden Mean.
And then there’s the discussion of Dynamic Forces, in which the “Pepsi Energy Fields” are compared to the Earth’s geodynamo and its magnetic fields, resulting in the priceless conclusion that with the “Pepsi Globe Dynamics”—I kid you not—“emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.”
But that’s not the end of it. Apparently, once you’ve gone this far ’round the bend, there’s no turning back. Because the theory of relativity is called into service, too, with a comparison between the gravitational pull on a light path and the gravitational pull of the Pepsi store aisle.
And once you’ve suggested your design can best be understood through an exegesis on the relativity of space and time, why not go for broke, and pull the whole universe into the discussion? Because that’s what Arnell does in its conclusion, noting that just as the universe expands exponentially, the Pepsi orbits “dimensionalize,” growing from the Pepsi Planet to the Pepsi Galaxy to the Pepsi Universe.
All of which leaves me desperately craving a Diet Coke.