Breathtaking?

There's been lots of chatter the past few days about this PDF supposedly created by the Arnell Group for their client Pepsi (download PDF)  to explain, defend, sell or perhaps even perpetuate a hoax around the new Pepsi logo.

Woo hoo! Marketing is the new comedy. Again.

I think this is wonderful. All of it.

The PDF is actually quite useful in the sense that it does walk you through some pretty painstaking effort in deconstructing a logo/icon over time in order to establish consistent graphic design principles. 

If you're a student of graphic design, there's some pleasure to be gained here. The Scale and Dynamic Relations on page 20, or the Color Theory on page 25 are solid examples of the kinds of work graphic designers must do.

But the language throughout, event the whole premise—"Breathtaking"—is hilarious: "The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations." Really, I thought it was sugar, mixed with fizzy water.

But who are we to judge?

There isn't enough information out there to say if this document is real, or if the client ever saw it. Or as my friend Joseph asks, "What might have been the issues or personalities inside Pepsi that warranted the creation of such a document?" 

Maybe the top brass at Pepsi need this kind of highfalutin' exercise to justify the hundreds of millions they'll spend implementing the new logo. Hey, that seems fair to me.

Or maybe the whole thing's just a designer's joke.

The meta data for the copy of the PDF I got says it was created by "sarndt," and it was originally created in Adobe InDesign as "08.08.01_Pepsi Breathtaking_FRANCE.indd." There's a Sandra Arndt who works as a Design Strategist at Arnell in NYC. 

Sandra, if this is your work, I say, "Well done." Thanks for the grist that keeps this conversation economy humming.

Comments

[terryl]

pePsi would have at least let the "P" rule the "C"