Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category

The cover to a $90 textbook

What the hell. This is a real textbook. A real textbook that costs $90 dollars. Seriously, anime? This isn’t an isolated incident either; there’s also The Manga Guide to Calculus and The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology, among other choice selections for the discriminating Japanophile who cannot function unless absorbing information via Japanese comic art. Note that some are published by Manga University! Damn, I want a degree in Manga; I’d hang that shit on my office wall.

I cannot comprehend how that cover could lend any sort of legitimacy to the book itself; it’s not even a decent drawing. Look at the anatomy. Her leg seems to be growing out of her stomach, which is in equal vertical proportion to the head and those are some long-ass monkey arms. Don’t even try to pull the “personal style” card either. That’s clearly an attempt at a realistically proportioned person based on the scale and rendering detail.

As for overall design: why is the illustration in front of a blurred photo of (or CG generated) explosion? It’s way too disjointed and there’s no cohesive connection between fore and background. It reeks of lazy cop-out design; throw a sketch on top of a stock background rather than using a fully fleshed out illustration. The “thought bubble” that forms the title is done with a thick black stroke on ellipse primitives; another stylistic departure from the illustration. Drawing a matching thought bubble is. not. that. hard. Poor implementation of the dodge tool for the laptop screen “glow.” Failure of contrasting the yellow “5th Edition” text on top of other warm colors, killing legibility. The author names fall victim to the same fate; cool contrasting with cool (but at least it is strong enough to work).

New & Busted





Old Hotness

Though La Rosa’s is a far superior pizza (with full emphasis on the Cincinnati hometown bias), I’m no stranger to Donatos; a pizza chain started in Columbus, OH in 1963. Back in February Donatos launched a new brand identity complete with new logo and store remodeling courtesy of Engauge, formerly TenUnited (surprise surprise, marketing firm websites with too much Flash that take too long to load).

Bland. Plastic. Unemotional. It’s exactly the type of logo that is cranked out by design committee; the kind of people who would use a word like “behaviorists” in a press release (look at the link above, they did). If you went to art school, you know the type; the ones that got their degree based on the amount of bullshit they could shovel rather than quality of their work.

Compare the two logos in the context of what they’re designed to do; sell pizza. What does the old one tell you about the product? It has that classic old-world style, with the fat serif lettering and “wooden sign” oval shape. “Hey, we make a quality pizza. How about you come in and try it?” The new logo screams fast food. “Here is your order, may I help the next customer?” Assembly-line pizza served by teenagers being paid minimum wage. Both are undoubtedly generic, but the context makes all the difference.

There are plenty of “Italian family” type pizza joints with corresponding logos, but at least the customer can identify with that family feel. The new logo is the bad kind of corporate generic, where you can just tell that the company exists to make money and the product is an afterthought. It’s funny, then, that their rebranding is in direct opposition to the stated goal of “We want to make pizza night special again” coupled with corporate jargon of “people want to trade-up for a more premium food experience.” What? I guess that means customers want TASTY PIZZA.

Quality of product comes before flashiness of presentation. Donatos pizza isn’t bad, but when your customers become a demographic rather than, well, customers, and you’re targeting your design around that, you’ve lost your focus. You can put a new coat of shine on it, but it’s still the same cheap pizza that it was before. If you want to be the better pizza experience, then make a better pizza. Blinging out your stores doesn’t magically make the food better. The redesign looks like a rejected Circuit City revamp that heavily cribbs from competitor Dewey’s Pizza (who puts out a higher quality/more expensive product than Donatos) with a touch of Chipotle thrown in for good measure.

Audio is a key element in advertising, but is often the weakest part of any single ad despite having the most resonance with the audience.

Why is audio so significant? Aroma is certainly more powerful because it lingers in the mind and can evoke a powerful reaction. I went to the mall this past Saturday to pick up a new pair of shoes and walked past a Starbucks, Cinnabon, and Auntie Anne’s. All 3 had a healthy amount of people waiting in line for service. You can smell their food from at least 3 stores away. The problem is that smell is very limited by location and product. It’s very difficult to deliver a smell to someone in their home. Rather feeble attempts limited to print publications can be seen, such as some type of sample pack insert or scratch-n-sniff, but those require that the viewer actively take action rather than engaging their passive interest. “Smell-o-vision” is nothing more than a joke in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and forever will be; people don’t want foreign smells forced on them in their personal space. The same holds true for taste. Touch is limited by immediate proximity. Like smell, neither can be easily submitted to the consumer.

The absolute worst thing you can do with audio is use unpleasant sounds in your ad. The primary goal of advertising is to make your audience want whatever it is you’re selling. Any unpleasant sound, like a crying baby or car alarm, becomes associated with your product and that negative sensation carries over. Unless the product directly relates to that sound via relief from it (children’s medication, earplugs, etc.), your ad has just turned off your potential customer. Of course there can be exceptions, such as the recent VW ad where a new car owner sets off his car’s alarm whenever a couple looking at it in the showroom get too close. The sense of mischief overcomes the negativity of the noise. The car alarm serves it’s purpose of being an attention grabber and then the content overcomes the negativity. This probably isn’t the best example, however, since there seems to be a lot of hate for this particular spot, and recent VW commercials in general.

The same applies to unexpected sounds, such as banner or pop-up ads that have speech. Usually the bitrate is so low that it sounds like it someone speaking through a cardboard tube, so it’s poor quality AND intrusive. TV spots do this too. Despite not technically being louder, commercial producers use various compression tricks to max out the midrange on their audio, making it seem much louder. Many viewers are forced to constantly adjust or mute the volume when commercials come on, and it’s gotten noticeably worse in recent years. Dolby is working on a solution, but a technical workaround shouldn’t be needed. Such a negative visceral reaction reflects poorly on your product; your ad didn’t get my attention, it annoyed me. People aren’t likely to buy something that annoys or displeases them.

Out of our 5 senses, advertising is predominantly limited to sight (print, billboards, etc.), sound (radio), or a combination of the two (television, web). Sight, like touch, is limited by proximity. Your audience must be actively viewing the advertisement. It is very easy to ignore or dismiss. If someone doesn’t like your ad they can change the channel, turn the page, drive past, or simply look away. Sound, however, has no such limitation; it travels through the air, unhindered by other masses. Your audience can be doing something else but still pay attention to the audio portion of an ad, and even be in a different space than the device broadcasting said ad. This is why audio is so significant; it is easy to consume and hard to avoid.