Coca-Cola – New Packaging Design

Coca-Cola has recently unveiled a new packaging design for its world famous Coca-Cola Classic can and made a dramatic step back from the trend of highly detailed designs, ice crystals and drop shadows by returning to simple white lettering on a red can. The new can was designed by the Turner Duckworth Consultancy here in the UK and the USA and came about as Coca-Cola believed that the increasingly complicated packaging designs where damaging the brand and turning it into a generic drinks brand. This new brand will be a polar opposite to Coca-Cola’s main rival Pepsi with its highly complicated Pepsi Max designs and it will be interesting to see which is more successful. I think the new packaging will be more successful as the old designs looked too much like a new fad and as a result looked old and dated very quickly whereas the simpler classic look will still look fresh in several years time thus preserving the life of the brand.

Juice Monkeys

This is a very simple but brilliant advert by CitigateSMARTS, Edinburgh for a new juice bar called ‘Juice Monkeys’. The advert is so successful because it works on several levels:

• The tone of voice is perfect; it is modern, young and fun just like the product.
• It is very simple, just like the product.
• It is clever and amusing which will appeal to the target audience.
• It is very different from other juice bar advertisement (it says nothing about how good the product is for you of how many of your ‘5-a-day’ it contains).
• It has a simple idea with a simple message and there is nothing complicating the design and getting in the way of that.

MTV Re-brand

MTV have just launched their new re-brand for the five UK channels (MTV1, MTV2, Base, Dance and Hits) and have based them on a series of 2D characters drawn by the Norwegian illustrator Kim Hiortoy. Each channel will have its one character, which is designed to epitomise the channel and values/personality. Instead of coming up with separate identities for each channel the creators have used “the metaphor of a house to represent the MTV network, with the individual channels signified by the people sharing the house” (CR August 2007). This is not only a great way of creating continuity throughout the MTV network whist allowing each channel to develop its own identity but it also offers huge potential for the future. Maybe these characters could interact with each other, they could develop their own narratives/stories, a new character could join the house, one character could take over another characters channel (I think this would be particularly interesting).

This is an example of a well thought out re-brand that has been designed to have a long life span – similar to the new London logo. The difference is MTV have created an identity that looks as good as the thinking behind it.

The Future of Fashion – The New Diesel ‘Human After All’ Campaign

The fashion brand Diesel has recently launched another brilliant new advertising campaign, this time with the tag line ‘human after all’. The campaign features a series of printed adverts featuring scenes from the future but when you look closer you realise that although the future may hold things such as intergalactic space travel, people will still suffer the same day to day problems that we face today such as cancelled flights (and of cause the models in the ads are wearing the latest Diesel lines). The shots where photographed by John Renck and the aim of the campaign is to show that the future wont always be as we imagine as people don’t really change – although one thing is certain, Diesel will always make cutting edge fashion. This is a simple, clever idea well executed with excellent art direction.

James Callahan Rag Posters

These are a series of posters for the Leeds University Union Rag week produced by my course mate James Callahan. These posters strike me as a very good example of how you can produce an exciting poster for a young market just using one colour and type. The combination of Helvetica Bold Condensed and the pure cyan colouring means the poster has a huge visual impact, especially in amongst a sea of other much more crowded ads, the copy projects the right tone of voice for the event.

A defence of the new London 2012 identity (well, a bit of a defence)

Firstly I must point out that I am by no stretch of the imagination a fan of the look of the new Olympic logo, it should have been throw out at the early stages of the design process and had I produced something this downright ugly on my degree course I’d count my self lucky if I actually passed. I do however admire the thinking behind the logo.
Firstly unlike many other logos Wolff Olins have produced one that doesn’t have any stereotypical items such as Big Ben or Tower Bridge.
Secondly the games won’t be for another 5 years and Wolff Olins have produced a design that won’t remain rigid – the identity has been designed to be changed over the years. It is similar to the highly successful Google logo in this way which is never the same from one day to the next. It has been designed in a way that designer will be able to ‘play’ with it for years to come.
Thirdly in my lifetime I have never come across a logo that has generated so much free publicity – never a bad thing. It is bright and easily recognisable and definitely different.
Fourthly it is simple and easy to reproduce for web, print, clothing TV etc – some people claim that this is bad a looks as if their child could have created it but as Bryan Bedell of the studio Coudal Partners points out ‘some of the worlds best logos as very simple (Christian cross is just two lines) and your child didn’t create it. So give it a rest. Or send us her CV’.

Obviously the list of negatives that people have put together is much longer than this, I just felt I needed to point out a few of the good points of the logo that’s its designers had in their defence – and who knows, in 5 years time we might all be queuing and prepared to part with large amounts of out hard earned cash for a 2012 branded t-shirt…

Diesel – Save Yourself

This is a copy of a post card I picked up whilst travelling through Paris a few years ago advertising the opening a new Diesel (a fashion brand) shop in Paris. It was created as part of the ‘Save yourself’ campaign by the Dutch designers Kessels and Kramer and the idea behind the campaign was simply that you shouldn’t wear clothes that made you look like a plastic manikin – you should wear one s that made you look like you. I like the ad because the models plastic/human face has a real ‘double take’ effect and goes against the clothing advertisements convention of using beautiful people that we should all aspire to be like. It is a campaign that was making the brand stand out from other fashion brands.