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.

You’ve probably noticed at your local grocery store or gas station that Pepsico has come out with a new corporate identity.  It’s clearly an attempt at an evolutionary (vs. revolutionary) change, with a similar color palette and predominantly blue background on the flagship product, Pepsi.  I think it’s a bad identity.  Find out why after the jump.

A logo refresh, and certainly a new corporate identity should push a company forward into it’s growing vision.  Branding should reflect where a company will be in ten years, and if properly done, will propel the company into that vision.  It should never be done to fit in better with “the crowd” or to better adhere to a current design trend.  Here’s the first thing that pops into most people’s minds when they view these:

“So Pepsi voted for Obama?”  At which point the Pepsi executives would say, “No, that’s not the Obama logo – it’s a stylized smiley face!  Isn’t that fun?”  Well, it sure doesn’t look like a smile to me, and I’m all about symbolism and implied meanings.  It looks like a bad print job of the old Pepsi logo.

There’s a lot that’s bad about this, from the nauseating “e” in “pepsi”, to the clinical, cold layout, to the fact that it looks like the packaging for an mp3 player more than a food product.  Plus, the logo changes depending on the drink!  Come on, guys!  That aspect seems to have been an afterthought, since with the pepsi max can, the logo has a much larger “grin”, depicting the higher caffeine amount in the drink, but the rest of the pepsi max can is bland, boring, grey, clinical and sterile.  If you’re going to change the logo to depict a more exciting customer experience, you have to follow through with the entire package – which they have not done.

This new look seeks to set itself apart from the competition, which it does indeed.  I’ll give them that: they stick out like a sore thumb, or like a medical appliance in the frozen foods section.

Feel free to comment, especially if you disagree with me.  I know there are mixed opinions on this out there.