I say, “Good job, Tropicana!” It’s nice to see a large brand be willing to backtrack and listen to consumers.  If only their parent company, Pepsico would follow their lead and go back to the old Pepsi logo!

What’s disturbing about this is that Tropicana’s corporate culture was so dense that this terrible design got through in the first place!  How many people along the way hated the new brand, but couldn’t say anything to their boss for fear of getting fired?  That’s frightening.  And how many people lied about the new brand by claiming that it was a good redesign?

So, I suppose this is a big day for bloggers everywhere – our collective efforts and freely shared opinions actually made a difference!  We can rest assured that our orange juice will once again look as good as it tastes.  God bless us every one.

Here’s a link to the New York Times article

And in case you missed it, here’s the article I wrote about the new design.

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.