Tag: branding

Pleased AF

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Often times, upon completion of presentation of a project, I wait a little bit afterward and then look at it again, to see whether or not I hate it yet.  So many times in my life I’ve made something, been very pleased with it, but then 1-2 days later I’ll look at it again but instead be completely disgusted with the things I create.  Regardless of what people might think or say about the things I make, when the day is over I am my very own worst critic and the true litmus test on whether or not I decide something I’ve created is satisfactory depends primarily on how I feel about it a little after it’s been out in the world.

Technically speaking, I am the creator of Arby’s Saucy_AF typeface they’ve released, as part of their marketing juggernaut team that I can proudly say that I know several members of.  I’m not the one who made the intricate characters out of sauce, nor was the person who photographed them, but I am the designer who vector outlined everything, and turned said artwork into a fully-functional typeface.  If I knew how to find out how to view the credits of a typeface, I’d totally show off the screengrab my name in them, but for now I’ll just have to settle with the private satisfaction of knowing that this is my work, and that I can also proudly say that I got to legitimately be a contributor to the Arby’s marketing team that is the envy and a shining star of marketing creative throughout the industry.

Few things are more satisfying than working with people you know you work well with and producing creative that I can be proud to say that I had a hand in.

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The whitest, most privileged feud since Duke vs. Yale

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Have your slave butler get the popcorn: the NRA is outraged with the YETI cooler company for deciding to cease their partnership as an NRA vendor, demands that their mindless, gun-crazy followers and underlings boycott

Is there anything more entertaining than two icons of things white people like feuding with each other?  In one corner, we have the YETI cooler company, the fairly young company that manufactures supposedly high-end coolers and drink receptacles that white people go gonzo over.  And in the other corner, we have the ageless and timeless National Rifle Association, the biggest punching bag save for the president himself for the left, rife with criticism for the fact that there’s a shooting almost every single day, primarily by white people, but that doesn’t change the fact that the alleged majority of NRA due-paying members are white.

And at first blush, it looks like the young white company has decided to distance its partnership with the company helmed primarily by old white people, and the old white people are none too happy about it.

Honestly, this does make YETI look a little more favorable in my eyes.  No, this isn’t going to make me drop what I’m doing and go drop $200 on a fucking cooler, when a $5 Styrofoam gas station box and 50¢ worth of ice accomplish the exact same thing, but it will take YETI out of my crosshairs as something to criticize because I for the life of me can’t comprehend why white people go so bonkers over a company that makes overpriced coolers and has the branding of all caps Arial Black on a black rectangle that makes me wonder what the fuck I’m doing with my career; yeah, it’ll prevent me from elaborating on that thought, with 700 more words.

But it doesn’t change the fact that seeing a good old fashioned white-on-white conflict makes me giddy with ironic anticipation at seeing two sissies getting into a slap fight.

Seriously, YETI vs. the NRA is the best white-on-white feud I’ve seen since Duke got paired up against Yale in the 2016 Men’s NCAA basketball tournament. 

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If this is what constitutes acceptable design, I need to change careers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

what the fuck is this shit

Were the exact words that my brain said when I looked at the new Creative Loafing Atlanta website.

I thought maybe the site had been hacked or something, and whatever Russian or Chinese hacking organization was deliberately using a 4-bit retro Oregon Trail looking interface as their ransom page demanding some Bitcoins in exchange for control over their website again, but after a few minutes, not seconds, of figuring out how the new navigation worked, it was pretty much confirmed that this was in fact, the new Creative Loafing Atlanta.

To cut to the chase, this is basically the worst redesign that I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  It’s worse than when Pepsi tried to use the Golden Ratio and the Vitruvian Man to explain their logo, which was pretty bad considering it literally cost Pepsi $1.4 million dollars for a PowerPoint so inflated with bullshit that it could have incinerated Palo Alto if it caught on fire.  But that’s just a logo, on a line of products that lots of people otherwise enjoy to indulge in regardless of what logo was slapped onto the bottles.

Creative Loafing Atlanta was already a publication in more or less rag status, and they’re an entity that can’t really afford to fuck up on design when whether people admit it or not, love to judge books by their covers.  And yet, here we stand, with a website that looks like an unintentional glitch, or your monitor fell face first and when you propped it back up, pixels are dead and busted, resulting in the horrific interface that currently loads.

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When in doubt, change the name, make logos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s the Atlanta way.  Or rather, announce news that declares some grand unification of transportation agencies in order to mask that some other umbrella-shell company is being created that will pay off a whole lot of new people for doing jack shit.

Fresh on the heels of my last post where Google put a spotlight on the unintentionally-official meaning of MARTA comes this news that Georgia is going to create a regional transit governing system that will oversee the mass transit authorities across the entire Metro Atlanta area; including MARTA.  The solution?  A new name!

The Atlantaregion Transit Linkauthority, or The ATL!  And they invented new words in the process because they don’t know how acronyms work!

In other words, the goal on paper is that supposedly by 2023, all buses, from Cobb’s CobbLink, Gwinnett’s GRTA, MARTA, and any other regional buses in Clayton or DeKalb will all be re-branded ATL buses.  All MARTA trains will be re-branded ATL trains.  The ATL transportation options will hopefully be consolidated under one brand and identity, with the theory that it will supposedly actually help boost economic viability.

What’s actually going to happen is that by 2019, the teats of all these regional transit authority will be milked by a few people who came up with this brilliant idea, they’ll make a lot of money, by 2021, The ARTLA will be all but forgotten 2022, Cobb and Gwinnett will still be afraid of black people and oppose the rebranding of their buses and in 2023, MARTA will still be MARTA, GRTA will still be GRTA, Cobb will still be vehemently opposed to black people, and Google will still spit out Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta in their queries for the meaning of MARTA.

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The Braves’ latest failure: Blooper

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So, to recap what kind of off-season it’s been for the Braves between the 2017 and 2018 seasons:

  • Their general manager, John Coppolella was fired and banned for life by Major League Baseball for basically cheating the system when it came to signing international amateur talent
  • As a result of Coppolella’s tampering of the system, the Braves were penalized by means of forfeiting the rights to 13 prospects
  • The Gwinnett Braves decided to rename their team because they want people to believe that their fans are stupid enough to mistake minor league Gwinnett Braves tickets for major league Atlanta Braves tickets, so to avoid the confusion, they decided to hold a contest for a new name, where the winner ultimately ended up being none of the selected options but instead, the “Gwinnett Stripers”
  • Their new spring training facility in Sarasota has gone from approved, to having an estimated cost of $75 million, to now costing $110 million, with likely more increases to come as time passes
  • Despite plenty of speculation that the team would try to capitalize on the Miami Marlins’ fire sale and make a trade for budding star Christian Yelich, they didn’t, and lost him to the Milwaukee Brewers (where his career will likely stagnate and become forgotten, in a boring market)

Needless to say, it’s been a pretty typical crappy offseason for the Braves this year.  It’s hard to say that things could possibly get any worse, but whenever anyone decides to tempt fate by saying that things couldn’t get any worse, inevitably they just have to.

Introducing Blooper, the new mascot of the Atlanta Braves.  What is Blooper?  Nobody really knows.  Apparently, he came from the “Character Builder 3000” and is a pretty good metaphor for the organization itself: uncreative, stagnant and nowhere remotely near innovative.

All anyone does know is that Blooper is like a Caucasian, less fat imitation of the Phillie Phanatic, of the division rival Philadelphia Phillies, which is extremely sad that the Braves are basically copying the Phillies.  Aside from when the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, nobody should want to copy the Phillies – they suck, their city sucks, and everything remotely associated with Philadelphia sucks.

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lol South Fulton Renaissance

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because nobody on the planet but me is interested: Renaissance, Georgia has their new name vetoed by mayor; cityhood reverts back to the City of South Fulton

Well slap me around and call me Susan – I would never have imagined that this was actually going to happen.  I also have zero idea of how the political system works, because last time I counted, the name was officially voted on and in both cases, Renaissance won out, regardless of how much opposition it got from the contingent who didn’t believe their opinions weren’t represented.  So despite all the voting, it ultimately still was shot down by a singular person: the mayor of Renaissance/South Fulton, who decided that the naming of the city was basically unimportant in comparison to other priorities, like creating a police force and infrastructure.

So it’s back to the City of South Fulton, which sounds as ghetto now as it did a month ago when it was phased out for Renaissance.  The people who were very pro-Renaissance are probably very disappointed, and those who weren’t so much fans of “the City of South Fulton” as much as they didn’t like the name Renaissance, well they’re probably very satisfied with themselves, in getting what they want.

Personally, I think the whole thing is an ironic joke which was a microcosm of just how much of a dead end the south part of the metropolitan Atlanta area actually is, and the perpetual spinning of wheels being done in the area I used to live in, which are always reminders of just how fortunate I am to have left when I did.  Basically, the City of South Fulton just wasted the better part of the last six weeks trying to get a name change, succeeded for a hot second, but then ended up with no change at all.  God only knows how much money was flushed down the toilet in this exercise in futility in wasted effort and labor towards a sinking ship.

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Only the Braves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back during the summer, the Triple-A Gwinnett Braves announced they were going to change their name, moving forward.  After sifting through the dank and salt for viable candidates, the final ballot was narrowed down to the following six options:

  • Gwinnett Buttons
  • Gwinnett Big Mouths
  • Gwinnett Gobblers
  • Gwinnett Hush Puppies
  • Gwinnett Lamb Chops
  • Gwinnett Sweet Teas

Obviously, none of these were particularly fantastic options, but I figured Buttons would’ve won easily, since it was the least over-the-top campy name, and that there was the historical element behind it, as Button Gwinnett was whom the entire county was named after as well as a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Regardless, at the county level and those who were remotely interested in the distraction of a dumb story like this, there was much debate, but more pettiness when it came to the topic of renaming the Gwinnett Braves, that really could be summed up with the fact that all available options were pretty shitty.

So naturally, the winner of the contest ended up being the Gwinnett Stripers.

What’s that you say?  It wasn’t an option?  By golly, it wasn’t!  The Braves blindsided the fans yet again, with the bat of no-transparency, and went ahead and made choices without the people that sign their paychecks!

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