[branding] While You Eat McDonald’s, Its New Mascot Will Consume Your Soul

3090.

McDonalds, that symbol of the modern age, has a new mascot intended to encourage kids to eat healthier versions of its Happy Meals™. I’m sure it will encourage them to eat something, but it will either be Burger King, or their own hopes and dreams in some sort of existential terror.

They call it “Happy”. And what it’s happy from, exactly, I don’t want to know.

Where to begin? Those eyes, those dead, dead eyes, devoid of emotion? The arms, like animated strands of pasta horror, waiting to grasp you? Or that mouth, that entry to the utter void of ravenous nothingness, seemingly torn from the living, with a darkness within that seems to be struggling to come out, like some poisonous misama driven to smother the living?

Gaze upon the horror, if you can:

Say hello to our newest friend, Happy! http://t.co/CuR3hU8Chj #HappyMeal pic.twitter.com/xgluLaHfcY
— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) May 19, 2014

Say hello to their little friend. They say it’s popular in Europe.

There are a lot of things that are popular in Europe that don’t have legs here.

Not even legs like those.

I’m not sure which horseman of the Apocalypse this is supposed to be, but it is one.  I know it!

[design] Rose Valley Butter’s New Package Design

3062.

There’s lot of good local to be bought in the stores of Oregon. A lot of it is provided by producer-based coöperatives; Darigold is one, and Tillamook’s cheeses is another. There’s one that I find many people haven’t heard of perhaps: it’s the Farmers’ Cooperative Creamery, based in McMinnville, Wine Country’s capital city.

Their brand, which one can find in the dairy case as WinCo, is Rose Valley Butter. Here is how it, until recently, was packaged:

… and, as of about 2 weeks ago, here’s how we started seeing it:

Quite a change. Let’s give it a little look-see…

Old package, left: New Package, right.

The original illustration is the real star of the old package. The color yellow is perhaps expected but really makes it a cheerful, sunshiny thing. The choice of illustration does play a little havoc with the choices the typographer had to make and therefore affects the hierarchy a bit: you see the word BUTTER big and proud but the brand name, ROSE VALLEY, kind of takes a supporting role. Not ideal, but understandable.

I love that illustration, seriously. It’s charming and a little corny, but well-executed for all that. It fits the image of a country creamery. The arranging of the letters inside the scroll ORIGINAL almost give it a hand-layed-out feeling.

On the back panel of the package you’d find this charming bit of history:

This brand is the most Oregon thing you’ll look at today, seriously. Hits all the positive notes, family, local, purity … it doesn’t say sustainable, but it doesn’t have to. Passionate? You bet. The Wife™’s world would be complete if only they marketed an unsalted version.

Please do this, FCC. Make my The Wife™a happy woman. She’d buy that stuff so hard, man.

The new package is rather subdued, though. Here’s a close up look.

The new design is a more dialled-back, quiet presentation. The sunny yellow is gone, replaced with a rustic buff tone; the charming farmscape banished in favor of a simple illustration of a generic rose; the omission of rBGH (as well as a note which I understand is Federally mandated about boasting about omitting rBGH) are both much more prominent. All four panels of the box now look like this.

The hierarchical problem is well-solved here, however, the solution of putting the brand name in Chancery script does not satisfy. Each majuscule letter of ROSE VALLEY here is fine as a drop cap or some similar application on their own. With each individual glyph having such a broad-shouldered personality, though, they all want to be the star. The ultimate visual effect is uncomfortable, optically discordant. Not only is a proper kerning between the initial V and the A in VALLEY impossible, the swash on the top of the A suggests that it’s foolish to try (and an apt demonstration as to why headline type in this style is pretty much a bad idea).

The big improvement is the FCC logo there. I enjoy it. It’s a cool, simple logo, type with a graphic fillip, that is a bit rustic and proud of it. Letting the logo flag fly is definitely a positive development.

I’m reluctant to bag on a brand I genuinely like. But I’ve come to the definite conclusion that the new-look Rose Valley Butter package is kind of a step back. If the brand needed to be refreshed (and I’d debate that), I think they should have tried a few more ideas.

But we’re not going to quit you over this, FCC. Far from it. You have fans in this household.

But get on that unsalted butter, okay. We’re so there for that. 

[logo] JCPenney’s New Old Logo … Back To The Future

3009.

Forward, into the past … just quietly. Easy does it. Back away from the new-style logo change and marketing approach and nobody gets hurt. We’ll not talk about this again.

JCPenney is returning to its roots in Helvetica, it would seem. It will be recalled that, back in 2011, they spiffed up their logo to an all-miniscule version that I reviewed positively (and still like). Not long after, in 2012, they changed it to a strange-looking square with an empty middle that carried the JCP trigram in the corner like the union of the US flag. While I appreciated the boldness of the approach, I didn’t care too much for the design … I thought the 2011 redesign had nailed it.

In the time since, much has happened at the store once known as The Golden Rule. A new CEO was brought in, Ron Johnson, who had a ton of New Ideas™. Ironically, the same man who’d worked magic at the Apple Store and Target pancaked so hard that to say he merely ‘failed’ would be gilding the lily, kinda sorta.

Business schools, I’m sure,  are still trying to quantify the degree of fail hard that happened here. The new ‘stores within stores’, the ending of sales to favor uniformly low prices, all sorts of issues … they not only didn’t attract a new constituency, they apparently nearly completely alienated the old one.

So, monumentally, he’s out. And, it happens, a lot of the stuff that he tried to do died with him. Some, right away, some others, more slowly. Like the new graphical attitude. I did note, when he flamed out, a lot of that went pretty quickly. Some lingered. The website took a long time to change, but, when I heard that Penney’s is rejiggering its store constellation – losing some 33 stores nationwide out of about 1,100 and losing 2,000 employees … it occurred to me that I might take a look at the website.

And here’s what I found:

There’s the old look. Which wasn’t a really bad look, after all; the use of Helvetica and a very simple wordmark kerned hard and just-so proves at least one thing; Helvetica is a timeless font and, at least in the JCPenney context, rather a timeless look.

As Hurricane Ron Johnson impacted, Penney’s went from hubris through nemesis to catharsis in what must be record time for American business. Returning to its own past is a smart thing to do here … Penney’s may have had an image problem, as far as some might have said. But it wasn’t being accused of not working for it.

[logo] GLAAD’s Contracting Name Means An Expanding Mission

2904.On a day when the Supreme Court considers pivotal matters such as whether humane treatment and regular civil rights obtain to those of who had the poor taste to be born other than heterosexual, I thought it would be germane, given my continuing interest in branding and logos, and marriage equality, to spotlight a particular change of branding – or perhaps, better said, an evolution.

The organization GLAAD – formed as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation – operates on the principle that words matter. By telling the human stories of those gay and lesbian people – your friends, and neighbors, humans, and functioning as a monitor on the media perceptions of gays and lesbians, they make that mission real.

Over time, the mission has expanded. Not only gays and lesbians but also bi and transgendered people face weal because of the way they lead their private lives in ways that heterosexuals not only do not fear but also can not, in some cases, comprehend.

Who gets physically attacked for being heterosexual? Nobody we’ve ever known. I am honored to count several LGBT people amongst my friends, and it’s a daily fact of life for them.

In a timely coincidence, GLAAD announced a subtle but important change and shift in its branding. In a move designed to show solidarity in its mission amongst the entire LGBT spectrum, it has simply reduced its name to ‘GLAAD’ to reflect that inclusiveness. That move was announced on the MSNBC program Melissa Harris-Perry just this last week:

“It is a natural progression that reflects the work GLAAD’s staff is already leading,” said Cruz. “We respect and honor the full name that the organization was founded with, but GLAAD’s work has expanded beyond fighting defamation to changing the culture. Our commitment to marriage equality, employment nondiscrimination, and other LGBT issues is stronger than ever, and now our name reflects our work on transgender issues as well as our work with allies.”

The logo itself is elegant in its simplicity:

The mission of amplifying a message is aptly rendered into a graphic message here, and needs no further commentary on that point except that the glaad word mark is just as aptly positioned as the agent of that amplification. The shaping of the expanding soundwaves is a clever visual bonus that unifies the graphic element and leads the eye well through the rest of the design.

The tagline is a succinct statement of its mission as well.

The reduction of an initialism- or acronym-based name to merely its unified form is hardly new. The game Dungeons and Dragons was created by a company named TSR; in its original form, Tactical Studies Rules, the company originally flourished and grew, but as its core products contracted to just the D&D brand and moved away from more generic miniatures-based military gaming, the company’s name shrank too; during its heydey and on into its absorption into Wizards Of The Coast, TSR’s name was just that; the three-lettered initialism.

GLAAD’s name evolution is kind of an opposite thing, though, in that shedding the words actually signifies an expansion of the mission. And we’re ‘glaad’ to see it.

(NB: This blog and its author support marriage equality. Did we have to say?)

[logo] Dominos Pizza, Dominos Logo – No Pizza, Just Domino

2860.The Domino’s Pizza chain, nourishing legions of families and college students since none-of-us-remember-when, looks like it’s going to start updating its image.

As revealed by Brand New, the Facebook page of Domino’s New Zealand have rolled out a new look to the logo. If you don’t care to follow the link above, here’s the new face:

And if you’ve stopped paying attention (because you’re not going to eat the logo, yes?) the old face was as such:

The diamond-shaped ‘box’ is no more; the blue now colors half the remaining domino.

Brand New’s reporting signifies that it was not yet clear (at the time of their writing) that this was a local or chain-wide change, but Advertising Age and the Los Angeles Times have since published stories that indicate that this is more than just a logo rework but sort of a ‘warm re-boot’ of the entire brand, which has added things like artisan-style pizzas and is now working on a re-think of the Domino’s store experience by spiffing up the spaces into more welcoming environments, and even maybe having a limited number of sit-down spaces at a few of them.

The new logo does show a bit more polish and sophistication. The type is where the slickness really shows; it looks like the type I see in the more hip print material I see, akin to Gotham or Freight or suchlike. The separation of the domino out is kind of a deconstruction, a ‘dressing down’ of the logo to its essential. The inclusion of the red is simply clever. The only real awkwardness is the matching of the the straight type with the tilted domino … they don’t harmonize, and the space under the domino comes off as something one wants to fix.

But it’s already starting to grow on me, so I think this one is a qualified success. I’d be interested to find out what the vox pop has to say about this one.

[logo] Big Sky Branding: Now Bigger, With Extra Added Sky

2857.That other western collegiate athletic conference, the Big Sky Conference, comprising eleven full member schools and two football-only schools in nine Western states, has decided it’s time for a makeover. The original logo:

Out with the old, and in with the new:

The new look certainly is more memorable than the old look, which wasn’t bad, but isn’t all that memorable. Old: there’s stock typography, a type outline which is something of a cliche in the sports design world, and the skyward spark coming from the ‘I’ adds a dash of interest but really doesn’t deliver that much in the way of excitement.

Maybe a change here was for the better, and we think it does improve on the old image. The type doesn’t look like it came from a font file but rather some design happened to it. The logo also recalls the roots of the conference; while the BSC now fields members from the Pacific coast to North Dakota (Portland State University plays in the Big Sky), the charter members were six schools in the Intermountain West, the fabled “Big Sky” country of America. So there’s the ice blue on the mountains and the deep blue of the sky. There’s also a theatrical approach to the way the words spread out in a perspective way, although it does rather remind one of a Wheaties box in some way.

In this article in The Oregonian (which is really just a press release released as an article (the last paragraph is the giveaway) one interesting and thoughtful note is that the logo is also designed in a school-color appropriate version for every Big Sky school. The organization behind the actual design work is SME, Inc, which gave the Pac-10 (Now the Pac-12) it’s new look and attitude.

Our verdict here is that we don’t know if it’s going to be up for any design awards or inspire a great deal of passion, but it’s a solid and timely redesign that replaces a rather unimaginative design that was a bit tired and due for replacement.

(H/T to the commenter “Unknown” in this posting, who wasn’t that wowed with it, but knows a neat subject when he sees one).

[logo] The New, New JCPenney Logo. No, Really.

2775.The aphoristic guide to appreciating Oregon weather … if you don’t like it, wait five minutes, it’ll change … has its counterpart in marketing now.

Who would have thought it would be JCPenney?

Back in August of 2011, not even six months ago, I noted that, the preceding February, the towering American retailer rolled out the first change in its visual identity in forty years, forsaking the old for this sexy new number:

Source.

I still find it an effective updating, and rather clever to boot.

Not clever enough, apparently. Now, thanks to Ben Rippel for tipping me off to this one, JCP has changed its visual attitude yet again. This had flown under my radar again but, once I got tuned into it, I found pretty much a metric ass-ton of commentary had been squawked about it …

But I get a little ahead of meself. Here’s the new, new JCPenney logo:

Source.

A bold, red square, a solid blue square 1/4 the size of the red one aligned in its NW corner with the minuscule trigram jcp in.

Ayup. 

The first reaction is to scratch one’s head. Why change a logo that was changed just a year ago, and one  which was, as far as this commenter’s concerned, working pretty well. I liked the update. These are the times when staying with something like a logotype based on Helvetica actually comes off as kind of bold, especially given Helvetica’s reputation amongst some folks. 

I’ve read various interpretations coming from the world of logo-speak on this. They all ring pretty valid. The absolute squareness of the logo is supposed to make the shopper think of foursquare honesty, honest and square dealings and square deals (and here again the company’s history, beginning with the reputation intended to be promoted with the store’s original name, The Golden Rule, factors in). The logo, which I presume will usually appear on white (thats my memory of most Penney ad collateral) is a very patriotic palette of red, white, and blue, and it’s not lost on anyone that the positioning of the blue square in the upper-left of the mark, an arrangement that vexillologists call a canton, combine to remind one of the American flag.

So, square-deal, honest mercantile, patriotic, American, cowboy hat!, yep, got it.

It’s not a poor showing for a redesign. And, lordy, it ain’t no New Gap Logo, to be sure. Some actual design seems to have gone into this. But only a year and we’re trying on a new identity? The old new one didn’t sink in really. 

If JCP were to ask me about this, I’d say if you’re going to change logos again, at least wait longer than 12 months. Even the most venerable companies change logo looks now and again. But twice in two years? Even with the complete company image rework, the new ‘stores-within-stores’, and the delightfully creepy NOOOOOOOOO! commercials, the taint of desperation obtains. Give this one a chance to sink in.

Stick with it.

Of course there is one thing I’d like them to settle, as The Consumerist’s article remarks:

We think the first thing the company should do is decide whether it’s JCpenney, JCPenney, JC Penney, J.C. Penney, Jcpenney, jcpenney, JCP, or jcp.

Word. 

Other readings;

• Styleite has an article about it with a JCP supremo speaking in front of the logo … a red square on a just-lighter blue background. Can you say simultaneous contrast? That puslating feeling you’re getting in your eyes isn’t real.
• The Consumerist‘s trenchant take.
• Margaret Bogenrief at Business Insider gives the whole rebranding approach thumbs down, and the logo? Hates it.
• And you can Google™ up a list of news articles about it, but I did it so you don’t have to. You’re welcome, America.

[logo] The New DC Comics Logo

2774.This just over the transom: word has wafted our way that DC Comics (noted that “DC” no longer is considered an initialism meaning Detective Comics, so the corporate name isn’t Detective Comics Comics, even though that’s how my brain is going to parse it for a while) has relogoed again … the last time was only 2005, six years ago. Here’s a version:

New DC Comics logo, Watchman Version
Sourced from here.

The new logo a ‘D’ applique, peeled back to reveal the ‘C’ beneath. It suggests that they can use it for a lot of customized effects for different franchises, as revealed in a graphic in this article at Designer Daily: http://www.designer-daily.com/dc-comics-logo-re-design-22643. The above is a clever play on Watchmen, which I guess needs no introduction, and in all holds a different mood and attitude than the old logo:

Sourced from here.

First thoughts about such a redesign is that of all the places that a little OTT design is in order, a comics empire’s logo might be it. Thought that the 2005 redesign was a fine bit of work and that it might have had more than 6 years worth of legs.

My mind was changed a bit when I saw the cool attitude that it helps give the DC Comics webpage:

On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s in there somewhere, though, trust me. Not too bad though. Will have to grow on me.

Stumbled on this review from a fellow Portlander who’s obviously a much more successful designer than I am (who isn’t?) which I enjoyed because she don’t like it and say so. Take it away, Sarah Giffrow. She does nail down the most salient point about it which is the logo don’t say ‘comics’. This is a subjective point, but you remember a few inches up when I mentioned that if there’s anyplace an OTT design is in order, the logo of a comics empire might be it? Same point, different words.

The new logo is sedate, serious, and clever. Whether or not this’ll fly the distance only, of course, time will tell … but comics fans are a vocal and visually-oriented lot, and will doubtlessly chime in presently if they’ve not done so already.

Agree? Disagree? Comment!

[logo] If This Logo Doesn’t Return To You, They Call It A Stick

2693.As reported by LogoLounge.com, a major rebranding has occurred on an Australian air carrier, and it caught my eye because of its cool modern style and the whimsy beneath the style.

You’ve heard of Qantas, no doubt … that’s probably Australia’s most famous airline. For about the last twenty years, though, there’s been a up and comer. You haven’t heard of it. Partly because it’s just all about Australia right now (a country that’s a continent, and easily as big as the USA), and partly because the name – Strategic Air – is kind of strange. It sounds like a very serious airline, one that only type-A business people and members of the military might enjoy.

The name grew from its original name and remit – Strategic Air Services, an airplane brokerage company. But now, it’s Air Australia … and I love the new look.

The colors are light an appropriate, but not low-contrast. And since Quantas has staked out the ‘roo as well as the koala, what great national symbol remains – why, the boomerang, of course.

I adore the boomerang design here. It’s deft and clever. Allows a visual unity with the wordmark and lives comfortably on the tail. The boomerang is one of the most wickedly-funny and wickedly-clever things ever devised … a stick which comes back to you. Uniquely Australian. And it transmits a positive message … if you take an Air Australia flight, you’re sure to come back, if that’s what you mean to do.

[logo] Comedy Central ReLogoIzes – But Is It Teh Funnay?

2550.

What you see is what you get. Comedy Central is redesigning its logo, and you’ll either love it or hate it, me thinks. Here’s a version I have screenclipped from the page where you can see a preview of next season:

The approach is clean, dressed-down and simple. You can look at it in two ways: cool and corporate, or zany within the bounds.

That the graphic component resembles the copyright symbol, ©, would seem to be intentional; the logo pops up just where you’d expect to see it in the video – above and to the right of the content of interest. Here’s the clip:

Comedy Central: This Is 2011

www.comedycentral.com

Funny Jokes It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Ugly Americans

The dry humor I find in keeping it real tightly designed but flipping the type in the word “central” works for me. But it depends on where one’s sensibilities lie, I suppose; Paul Constant of the PMerc finds it rather nifty; the first commenter equates it with the Gap logo faux pas of a few months back.

I disagree there. The new Gap logo seemed thrown together in Word as WordArt; this identity gives me the feeling that, despite its simplicity, there was a good deal of care involved in settling on that font. One does not choose Gotham lightly.

Read Paul Constant’s article on it here: http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2010/12/10/this-is-how-you-update-a-logo.

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