The PDF linked in the article [0] is pure gold.

> C. The investment in our DNA leads to breakthrough innovation and allows us to move out of the traditional linear system and into the future

> BREATHTAKING is a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating an authentic Constitution of Design.

> B. Magnetic Fields: Magnetic fields exert forces on inner and outer surfaces of the Earth.

> B. Pepsi Energy Fields: Symmetrical energy fields are in balance.

> C. Magnetic Dynamics: Magnetic field are impacted by sun radiation and wind motion.

> C. The Pepsi Globe Dynamics: Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.

Also, take a look at the deconstruction of the old Pepsi logos into arbitrary ellipses ("Perimeter Oscillations") on pages 8ff.

It gets increasingly surreal ("Light Path with Gravitational Pull" vs "Gravitational Pull of Pepsi", "Relativity of Space and Time" vs "Pepsi Proposition / Pepsi Aisle", difference between a "Pepsi Galaxy" and a "Pepsi Universe", ...) on the last pages.

Dimensionalize exponentially.

[0] https://jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pepsi_grav...

This PDF is hilarious. How can anyone get away with so much bullshit is beyond me.

I can't tell if this is real or not. It feels like the Turbo Encabulator of design.

It's one step away from VX junkies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/

Because no one is really reading it. It's not there to be read. It's there to exist. You can't pay 7 figures for a simple image file. No. There must be "a reason" for that logo to look like that. So you get someone to drum up a few pages of bullshit to justify paying 7 figures for it.

And the sad thing is that everyone knows it's bullshit on some level. But I'm not paying 7 figures without getting handed that bullshit, and you're not charging 7 figures without being able to create it.

I would pay a million dollars for this as a piece of performance modern art.

They need to justify the spend for the execs with something that looks like it took more than 100 man hours to work out.

What I'm curious about is how much these design agencies recycle their stock bullshit for different clients. Just swap in different logos. Restyle with the new palette of pretentiously named colors. Apply the new commissioned font and voila, you have a rebranding document the C levels can feel chuffed about.

I wouldn't assume that. In these echelons, people are generally aware that they're all bullshitting each other.

I'm curious why your perfectly fine comments are being downvoted.

Money laundering? Tax breaks? Not in this case but as a general rule where there is a big, weird, transfer of money

I just skimmed through the PDF (not that it has much content). I can't believe someone paid for that. Clearly I'm in the wrong business.

Make no mistake, it's a lot of work to get to the point where you get to be the one to charge Pepsi a million dollars for a logo.

Creating the bullshit in the PDF is the easy bit, getting someone to pay for it is the hard bit.

That document is astounding. My jaw dropped, literally, on some pages.

> "Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity."

This is where I lost it.

And that's when they literally started building a "tiny brain, normal brain, enlightened brain, galaxy brain, universe brain" meme, out of freaking Pepsi logos.

I can't possibly be the only one here who understands what they were getting at, right? It seems silly but it's pretty obvious that they're just trying to get at the intentions and associations behind their aesthetic decisions. It's only as absurd as human pattern-seeking behavior is in general.

> I can't possibly be the only one here who understands what they were getting at, right?

It was both accurate and profound.

Unfortunately the parts that were accurate were trivial and the parts that were profound were incorrect.

The pdf author thinks a light year is a speed and the universe expands at f(x) = e^x. Someone was copying stuff they didn't understand off the internet.

Oh, I definitely get what they're getting at. They just wrapped it up in way, way more window-dressing than was remotely justified. It makes the whole thing look farcical.

Well, you could take that literally, or you could take that as a marketing draft, where every idea written in the PDF would later be used as part of advertising.

Bullshit is what makes good video adverts rememberable. It just has to be unique bullshit.

My favorite is:

    C. The Pepsi Globe Dynamics
         Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.

I didn't even know those words were allowed to be together.

Apparently that branding company is also active on the Wikipedia page for the logo:

> The subliminal advertising involved with the Pepsi Globe logo is also extensive. The different logos and packaging designs are purported to represent the human body, rediscovery of the Vitruvian principles and their publication, Chinese art of placement and spatial arrangement and many other representations that may not seem clear or obvious from just a glance at a Pepsi Bottle. The most famous visual representation is the Pepsi Globe logo’s representation of The Earth. The swirling horizontal stripe running through the center of the globe is claimed to provide a visual representation of the earth’s constant movement around its own axis and around the sun. The stripe also represents a naturally occurring electric generator in fluid motion generating and sustaining the magnetic field of the Earth. This marketing has resulted in an extremely recognizable logo and an aid to a profitable venture.

This sounds like someone just cribbed off their syllabus from design school to write up a brief.

It still amazes me that they're persisting with the fat-belly logo. It looks like a fat dude with his belly hanging out. It's not something that, once seen, can ever be unseen, even years later. Makes me chuckle on the inside, every time, and plays its part in reminding me of dangers of pop over-consumption.

I never thought of it as a fat-belly logo, the mockup is pretty funny. I always thought of the logo as similar to a tennis ball. In my country, I remember Pepsi giving away blue/red coloured 3x tennis ball packs with a cases of Pepsi.

Every abstract logo can be interpreted in many ways if people culture jams it.

I was literally stunned how MS Office team was announcing icon redesign for their suite and how some part of the community was mindlessly applauding this breathtaking change as improvement in their lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YplAU5myNP4

Sure, it's something that looks new and good - minding how current icons are having a rather simple style to put it mildly, but that's not a technological advancement like introducing Ribbon interface in Office 2007. And sadly, that's how MS, Apple and others are trying to portray all these barely significant UI changes - as features.

Don't get me wrong, good looking UI is important but I'd be happy if cosmetic changes would remain cosmetic changes and be treated as such. I can appreciate visual improvements and work by myself and I don't need, want to be instructed by marketing teams to feel "enthusiastic" about such changes.

That icon video was nothing.

They, literally, went full-on action movie for Office 2010.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUawhjxLS2I

Oh my.

Speechless.

Incidentally, that video is very nice for showing off global illumination in 3D rendering.

Visio and Access: Kicked to the curb.

I can imagine the thinking on Pepsi's procurement end after all said and done:

"Oh yeah, looks like a modern version of our old logo - good! Seems like there's some golden-ratio-ey stuff behind it too which will have subliminal effects - bonus! Price is abit steep but only exceeds our budget by 10% - don't wanna cheap out either, so let's take it!"

Seems like money well spent in the butt covering department. If their new logo flopped and someone in charge said "I paid some designer $1000 to draw up this new logo" he'd be out of a job and blackballed from the industry. If he says "we spent a million dollars building this logo and had a study done to back it up!" then who can blame him we never saw this coming.

That's almost certainly what's happening. The pricing of logo design and branding is about how much it's worth to the client and how much risk the designer is taking on [0]. This design firm put its name on a logo for an international corporation worth billions of dollars and people made fun of it for looking like a fat dude; that's a major embarrassment whose potentiality was probably considered in the pricing.

The same people chuckling at how nonsensical the design document is supposed to be (and it really isn't) are probably the same people who could talk your ear off about the esoteric particulars of a given programming language or management strategy, which are also, to some degree, subjective BS couched in jargon and seeming non sequiturs.

0 - https://youtu.be/RKXZ7t_RiOE

Oh man, it reads just like timecube: http://timecube.2enp.com/

Per the last 'update' of Gene's:

"In 1884, meridian time personnel met

in Washington to change Earth time.

First words said was that only 1 day

could be used on Earth to not change

the 1 day marshmallow. So they applied the 1

day and ignored the other 3 days.

The marshmallow time was wrong then and it

proved wrong today. This a major lie

has so much boring feed from it's wrong.

No man on Earth has no belly-button,

it proves every believer on Earth a liar."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMZdNyRIATo

If any of you enjoy brand critics tearing apart corporate brand and identity redesigns, check out Brand New, the reader comments section is gold:

https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/

Thank you @andybak, you made my day. Truly admirable document! This is the highest concentration of BS I have ever seen. I have to check who was the VP Marketing and CEO of Pepsi were at the time. They deserve a place in history for having bought that pipedream.

Someone took the Post-modern Essay Generator[1] to a whole new level it seems...

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Pepsi is a global brand, $1M is on the low end for a redesign of their primary logo.

The amount of money is fine; the quality of services rendered for that money is a joke.

I dunno. Not only did they get a logo, they got a pretty great historical document.

Thanks for sharing, didn't know the story. Absolutely astonishing.

What in the world? This can't be real!

And just a couple of days ago there was a paper and discussion on "Bullshitters" on HN.

This always comes to my mind when I have to speak to someone in marketing.

Marketing as a discipline is mostly about numbers (reach, sales, etc.). Ad buys and campaigns. This... this is the work of "Creative Professionals".

I immediately CTRL+F'd pepsi to look for this.