This is the first product from a new company, Satisfy Your Soul.  They are two professional chefs in Burlington, NC who use all natural, locally-sourced ingredients to create unique recipes inspired by their worldwide travels.  This Apple Chutney is inspired by the authentic flavors of India, and uses Winesap apples from the 2010 North Carolina apple harvest.  The curry blend is unique to the Satisfy Your Soul chefs.

They asked me to take their vision for authentic international flavors, chef-created recipes & locally sourced ingredients and create a label design that would communicate all of that.

We also did all the copywriting for this. Jessica came up with a Story Panel that describes the chefs’ inspiration.

Photography by Kevin Lee of Studio Place, Inc. You can reach him at (336)854-8828.

There is one song on their last album entitled, “In Regards to Myself”, which ends with the line, “Wake up, wake up, wake up, and step outside your box!  Wake up wake up!”  That line came to mind as I thought about this new youth conferene, which already had it’s theme: Awaken – from Paul’s letter to Roman Christians in the first century.  You can find this quote in the New Testament of the Bible:

“Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. Romans 13:11

I decided to use the Brochure as an opportunity to empower the youth attending the conference to do their own guerrilla-style marketing.  Toward that goal, the outside of the brochure is a standard tri-fold layout, but the inside, when opened, is an 8.5 x 11 poster with all the necessary information “built-in”.  This lets the attendees take the brochure and put it places that the conference organizers wouln’t be able to get to.

In the end, I produced an outdoor banner, tee shirt design, CD label and packaging, brochure/poster and a website for the event.  The end result: it worked! The conference was a resounding success.

After:

A brief, focused history of Mountain Dew’s can designs. I’m not including varieties, such as Code Red, Live Wire, Sport, Diet, promotional designs or extra large designs. The first ever can designed for Mountain Dew, before it was owned by Pepsi:

And, here’s the redesigns of that product package until 2009, again not including the intentional limited-run items.

The above is my all-time favorite, following the original design.

I find it fascinating to view them lined up like this.  You can see a definite progression of the imagery.  One of the immediate things I noticed was the way the logotype becomes more slanted through time.  The first design was very much straight, hand-placed type.  As time went by, the name become more and more slanted until now when it’s probably at a 45 degree angle.  That’s really steep!  I think the second can looks more like a beer can than a soft drink can.

My favorite has to be the original design. I love how it directly references it’s moonshine heritage.  For those who don’t know, “Mountain Dew” originally was a slang term for illegally-distilled alcohol, also known as “Moonshine” that was created in the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia.  The original Mountain Dew softdrink was created by two bar keepers as a beer chaser and moonshine mixture to sweeten mixed drinks.

The designs definitely got boring during the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s.  It seems that during the 1990′s, Pepsico started to target a younger audience with some intentionality, which can be seen in my love of the can that I mentioned above.  That can design gives me good memories, directly associated with good design and a good product.  Will the new design be able to elicit the same reaction from today’s clientele?  That remains to be seen, but I would guess the answer is no.

One of the best package designs ever.  The eye is moved through the whole design quickly and easily – on purpose.  You see, the human eye first goes to the bottom left of an object, so you need some type of diagonal element to move your eye from the bottom left to the to right.  The old Tropicana carton did that beautifully with the round orange, and note the green leaves poking toward the bottom left of the carton, where your eye can “use” them to get into the design.  The dark gradient in the middle of the orange perfectly and forcefully moves your eye across the orange’s surface to the straw, with the perfectly illustrated drop of juice – or is it water? – then up the straw, where your eye meets the curved Tropicana logo, bringing you around full circle to the top left of the design, where you then move along the left edge of the orange back to the bottom left, where you started.  That’s when you notice the “100% Pure & Natural Orange Juice” badge, as well as the superfluous data at the bottom.  However, before you move on, notice the relationship between the logo and the “100% Pure & Natural” typefaces.  The logo uses a soft, curved, slightly tropical, sensual, organic type while the lower badge uses a small-caps serif typeface to balance the logo with a touch of seriousness, even majesty.

Other notes on this would include the wonderful pairing of orange and green and the way the vertical orange stripe bisects the design, yet implies a sort of award ribbon – though only subconsiously.

Now on to the new design, which came out only a year or so after the above design was released.  Here it is, in all it’s new fangled glory:

So, a few things are evident here.  Number 1 is that Pepsi, and by extension Tropicana, has an affinity for mid-90′s british design, when geometric sans serifs were used alot. Except they used them well.  Second is that Tropicana was tired of having a logo!  “Hey, let’s not have a logo.  Everybody else has a logo.  Let’s just use our regular text font, and stick that little leaf thing above it!”  Third, Tropicana doesn’t want to be associated with tropical anymore.  Tropic does not equal Tropicana.  It’s now Tropican’t.  Ha.  Haha.

Now, you can see that they tried to move your eye up the design again, from the bottom left to the top right, but the execution has several flaws.  First, the darker color is on the left, which makes the left side visually “heavier”, which in turn can make your eye get caught in a perpetual roundabout on the left side of the carton, especially when viewed straight on, instead of the above 3/4 view. Plus, the curve of the orange glass leads up to the top edge of the carton, instead of curving your eye back into the design! That’s not good.

There’s no clear focal point in this design.  The size of the white “100% Orange” competes with the logo, which competes with the “squeezed from fresh oranges” bit.

All in all, this new design looks like a supermarket discount store brand.  Or maybe a Target Market Pantry item from 5 years ago.  Oh, and I love what they did with the bottle cap.  I can hear the executives now, “We need to do something with our cap!” “I know! Let’s take the old one and put an orange boob on the top of it!”  “That’s genius!”

In case you haven’t checked the blog in a while, check out the post I did on the new Pepsi logo

Keep going, Pepsi – at this rate, you’ll be giving the design blogosphere fodder for a decade!

Oh, and I have to give mad props to the folks over at Under Consideration, and specifically their blog, Brand New for pointing this out, as well as the new Pepsi logos.  They get behind-the-scenes news about this stuff way before it hits the shelves.