The unusually high rate of bad branding decisions lead me to believe we are in a design recession. These huge brands have come up with some bad design choices during 2009. Sift through the rubble of the design recession.

Bing

Lets start off with one of the brands that have caused designers and typographers the most strife in 2009. Bing’s logo crosses a lot of lines for designers for so few letters. The lettering choices, the stretching, the character contours all contribute to this logo’s cringe appeal for many. Without being all negative, Bing has some innovative search options, especially in the image search, which make the logo bearable for short periods of time while browsing.

Pepsi

Pepsi and all of it’s child products (like Mountain Dew, Sierra Mist, and Tropicana below) underwent individual re-branding efforts for logo and packaging this year completed by the design firm Arnell. I’d imagine they’ve caught a bunch of heat for it by now.

Pepsi’s brand and logo have been simplified down to the essentials, no more ice crystals and condensation, but many, including myself, think this was less than necessary and probably in the wrong direction. The width of the white swatch changes depending on the type of Pepsi and the type is now lowercase on a solid color. The lettering of the ‘e’ has been customized to mimic the old mark. Some say the mark is now supposed to represent a smile but I don’t see it. The type leaves something to be desired and is less recognizable.

MTN Dew

Mountain dew mostly suffered from a tragic name change. Totally unnecessary but perhaps an attempt the make the brand even more radical and ‘hip.’ As is the case will all of these branding crashes, I would’ve paid to be around the table when this was being decided.

Sierra Mist

This Pepsi brand may be the one that infuriates the designer in me the most. It’s true that the lettering wasn’t amazing before but now the can looks like an ad for a Stephen King movie complete with bad blurry text effects and creepy woods. The ’sierra’ type (also lower case) mimics the Pepsi logo. I don’t think i have to do too much explaining to designers why the blurry ‘mist’ makes me sad.

Tropicana

Tropicana caused quite a large stir when their re-branding efforts thought it apt to rid themselves of the iconic orange with a straw. Some things about the new packaging and brand are nice, don’t get me wrong, but Tropicana had to realize that the orange with the straw was a core part of their brand. I even had a promotional product from Tropicana as a kid – was an AM/FM radio shaped like and orange where the straw was the antenna. Because of all the uproar Tropicana changed their branding / packaging back in short order.

IKEA

IKEA’s branding change was a little more subtle but no less important. The most recent of the branding crashes, IKEA has changed many of their in-store and catalog type treatments from its traditional Futura to the web-friendly Verdana. Verdana was designed by Microsoft specifically for the screen. Many designers think this is a pretty important consideration for the type choice. Futura also seems to fit more with the IKEA brand in my opinion.

SyFy

SciFi had undergone a name and branding change. I’ll admit the name is quite strange now but I don’t think I would mind the type treatment as much if it wasn’t for all the three dimensional effects. I think the tag-line is also pretty vague and terrible. Their rational - “You can’t have a brand called ‘Sport’ or ‘Drama’ or ‘News.’ It’s just not a brand name” (Dave Howe from SyFy declares independence from it’s old name.) SyFy’s online community has had the largest reaction to the switch.

The Hut

Pizza Hut has added an alternate (read: confusing) logo to the original called The Hut. Their reasoning?

“And yes, we’re also introducing another vocabulary word with Pizza Hut, which is’The Hut.’ That ties in nicely with (today’s) texting generation. We wanted to make sure that Pizza Hut and ‘The Hut’ become common vernacular for our brand. Pizza Hut CMO Brian Niccol in BrandWeek“

The new design direction isn’t all bad but Pizza Hut loses brand equity by the minute as they try to re-invent themselves to fit in better with the texting generation.

The Shack

Another strange and similar branding change, RadioShack has dropped the Radio and is now “The Shack” for many of its promotions. It doesn’t seem that the old logo will be going anywhere but RadioShack is trying to change how the public views them with this campaign. The type is rather bland and the name change does nothing but make them more un-cool in the tech supplier world. It seems like a half baked scheme to get in with that texting generation.

Animal Planet (2008 Throwback)

Okay, this one actually isn’t from 2009 but I had to throw it in here because it’s one of the most egregious errs in branding I can remember. My friend Andy first spotted in on the New York Subway and didn’t quite know what to do with himself. I think it looks like they sat one of the chimps from their shows in front of a computer and told him to have at it. The stretching and rotation of the letter-forms is painful and seemingly very arbitrary. Had to include it.

State of the Design Recession

2009 is still relatively young. Will this trend in large brands compulsively re-branding continue and will it continue to turn out all wrong? I sure hope not. It’s almost like companies got a memo from the design community that they needed to re-brand because that’s the thing to do this year.

Your Turn

Did I miss any major brands tanking their redesigns? Was I too hard on the mentioned brands or not harsh enough?

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