A newer Lemon Demon song. You HAVE to read the document it’s inspired by because it is the best story behind a song ever. The art and the picture below are both cut from the document:
A disgruntled employee leaked the document that they use for future logo design and it is… the craziest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.
A music video is coming eventually that is basically a chopped up and edited version of the presentation
wh
the pdf i
i saw a part of the pdf on my dash and now i have to post this again
wait i just saw this bit and what the fuck
how did they sell this to pepsi
REALLY worth looking at the pdf while you listen to the song. Spoiler alert: contains comparison of pepsi logo to the golden ratio as well as the phrase “pepsi energy fields”
Oh, wait, there’s more. As you might have guessed, the design blogs wet their pants when this document appeared to have leaked out. The 2009 Pepsi redesign by the Arnell Group had already been widely panned and seemed to be poorly received by the public, and there’d been talk that senior staff involved with the program were under Federal indictments, dramatic divorces and personal bankruptcies. Trouble is, nobody could figure out who the various people named were, or why Arnell had never heard of them. The intrigue deepened. Finally, some new user on Reddit leaked this amazing document of the process, entitled “Breathtaking”, and it was immediately in the hands of stunned bloggers everywhere, choking on laughter as they shared bits of its content bordering on the insane and wrapped in the most pretentious branding/marketing lingo that was all too familiar to those involved in corporate design travesty. It resonated both with frustrated designers and experienced marketing agencies, as well as with members of the public with no relation at all to design. It was deliciously batshit, and it was all fake. Arnell had pulled a golden prank on everyone, the document had worldwide viral distribution. People had been pestering Pepsico trying to get stories: what did corporate heads think? Is Pepsi okay? This cost a cool million? Pepsi gave them the company line, and to this day has never acknowledged the prank officially. Some, like Armit Vit of UnderConsideration, had twigged that nobody at Arnell would have ever let that go out under their name, and figured it was a similar strategy to the “viral” video that Agency.com had distributed to its actual customer in 2006 (video), a bro-tastic, camp-casual, NYC-via-Portland, tongue-in-cheek take on hipsterised corporate marketing that anyone today would recognize as the bit of fun that it was, but at the time was merely watched, po-faced, by people likely annoyed at having to squint at their computers for almost ten minutes wondering where their money had gone. It hadn’t gone over terribly well, and it was never ‘viral’; the joke fell flat. Arnell’s move was better-prepared, and may have had its greatest impact upon everyday working designers and marketers who hear abysmally-unhelpful, buzzword-ridden vision statements from hard-to-please clients all the time, and have to wonder about the real movers and shakers in the industry. If it’s this awful to work for schmucks in the suburbs, what even goes on in places like Pentagram or Big Spaceship or Vignelli? But wait. Yes, it gets better. In 2009, Pepsi revealed it was rejecting a new $35M package design for its Tropicana brand, due to poor customer reception. Who was behind that? Peter Arnell. He decided to issue a statement to the press:
He doesn’t sound like a well man. In fact, he sounds as though he’s internalised the pretentious advertising-via-emotion crap and he speaks the buzzwords with real sincerity. He’s troubled. Maybe the Pepsi rebrand wasn’t a joke after all. Adweek, who was on the fence over the Pepsi thing, has followed Arnell with a bit of a passion since the nineties, and has a number of articles about him, each fascinating in some way. Shortly after the redesign, Newsweek profiled Arnell, and the article itself reads like satire. It wasn’t. In 2011, Omnicom, the conglomerate of which the Arnell Group had operated under, fired him. He responded with a lawsuit, claiming Omnicom wouldn’t return his property. The Pepsi thing still hadn’t been sorted out. It had been serious. Remember those interesting Adweek tidbits? Here’s another, penned shortly after that lawsuit. He wasn’t just suing Omnicom, he was suing the Arnell Group, which his wife was running, partially in order to compel them by law to return to him a fortune in vintage fucking spectacles. Really. Go back to the Newsweek piece: “He owns 1,600 pairs of eyeglasses, all fitted with his prescription.” No, wait. Keep reading. When asked about the Tropicana thing, he responds “it’s not my brand. It’s not my company. So what the hell? I got paid a lot of money, and I have 30 other projects. You move on.“ And move on he did; around the same time he had bent Chrysler’s ear about the development of a new, personal-mobility product he called the Peapod. He got the name from his own initials: Peter Eric Arnell. The article continues: “He says it’s not a car, but rather a new category he’s invented, called a “mobi.” He describes its design as “a mix of Darth Vader, a bullet train, and a Citroën deux chevaux.” With no air conditioning and a top speed of 25 miles per hour, the $12,500 Peapod is basically a fancy golf cart. Arnell hopes people will buy them for doing errands around town. He wants to call customers “peaple” and has designed a line of accessories: pens, flashlights, T shirts, baseball caps, shopping carts, picnic baskets, yoga bags, gardening sets. He’s even designed fragrance inserts that create an aromatherapy experience while you drive. “I would argue this business could be hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars,” he says. His counterpart at the meeting, a veteran Chrysler engineer, just nods and says, “Uh huh.”
This isn’t satire. This is what the guy is actually like. The article concludes, after having heard positive things from Pepsico about the logo redesign, with this tidbit: “I keep remembering something Arnell told me when we sat down to breakfast in New York. “It’s all bullshit,” he said. “A logo on a can of soda? Please. My life is bullshit.”“
i think about this document and the pepsi logo o face at least once a week
Episode 4: What if the most dark and depressing thing you’ve ever seen from this franchise, sending you into an existential tailspin of horror and despair so you have to just simply sit on the floor for a while and contemplate the futility of your own free will?
My favorite bayverse moment was the one where a tiny Mexican girl called Megatron a cabron and because I was seeing this in Arizona pretty much the entire theater went “OOOOOOOOOH”
