Megalongcat | Design in the Presence of Idiocy. -

Today we’re taking an in depth look at three companies famous across America for providing food and drink to the American people for generations.  Each brand is one that most of us have grown up with and though we are used to seeing slight variations in logos over time, there is nothing more upsetting than a complete redesign of a brand you’re most familiar with.  The three companies I’m talking about are Tropicana, Pepsi, and Kraft Foods.  Each of their logos has been influenced by the recent string of corporate branding logo redesigns that focus on minimalistic sans-serif fonts (a byproduct of the web 2.0 movement perhaps?) coupled with flat logos and imagery.

First up is Tropicana.  When you think of Orange Juice you’re likely to find yourself thinking about Tropicana as one of the many brands you’re used to (especially if you’re from the east coast).  What is most bothersome about Tropicana’s redesign is not that it looks bad, but it doesn’t play true to Tropicana’s “homey” feeling that resonates with the heart of America.  The new logo is based on a distinct grid layout and keeps all of the information perfectly fit within it making it a great design piece, but it doesn’t help the brand in the slightest.  Tropicana also is known for its multiple types of orange juice, yet this new logo which should in theory make understanding information easier, fails miserably and helping us identify what kind of orange juice it is.  It took me a couple of minutes in the store to figure out which orange juice was the regular, and which was the one mixed with strawberries since there are no longer large pictures on the front of the boxes to clue you in.  Incidentally, I’m hyper-allergic to strawberries and had I been in a rush in the morning to get a drink, this rebranding would’ve been the death of me.  Literally.

This is a little late to be chiming into the hating of Pepsi’s new logo, but it’s perfect in terms of this post because it personifies the start of what I will refer to as the sans-serif movement.  Design has trends, everyone understands that, but for designers of the major corporation Pepsi to play into these trends with little thought of the aftermath is negligent of their responsibilities as a designer.  I won’t call the new logo ugly, but like the Tropicana logo it does a complete disservice to functional information design by using a thin sans-serif font as the textual identifier of the brand Pepsi because it is hard to notice to almost anyone.  Many people easily mistake it for another brand completely.  OF course the counter argument to this is that the logo image of the red, white, and blue ball is placed in the center of the bottle to let people know “Hey, We’re Pepsi.”  But this also fails due to the small, but visibly monumental difference of the original Pepsi logo image and the old one.  Yet again people could easily mistake Pepsi for another brand completely.

The new Kraft Food’s Logo is the least shocking in terms of a rebrand when compared to the other two, but it features an unnecessary rebranding of an already famous product.  We all know Kraft Foods, even moreso because of their cheese, and what was great about the old logo is that even though it is a poorly designed, and slightly obnoxious logo, it stands out against the other brands on food shelves.  The whole reason behind any food product with a bold label is that it’s supposed to be easily seen up close and from a distance so that people can immediately recognize the brand and put it into their shopping cart.  If a brand is not easily recognize, like in Kraft’s case, they run the risk of losing sales.  I appreciate the designer’s attempt to take the obnoxious and old Kraft logo and turn it into something trendy and modern, but it doesn’t seem like they took into consideration why that logo looked a certain way to begin with.  I’m very interested in seeing how the sales of each of these three products do at the end of 2009 when compared with their 2008 sales figures.  I will make sure to have an end of the year compilation and analysis of sales figures and numbers.

So what do you think about these corporate redesigns?  For better or for worse and why?