Tag: branding

The Substance was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In one hand, I don’t throw this claim around lightly – I think that I can be picky about the things that I really like, and I’ve been told a bunch of times in my life that I’m a difficult person to impress, where it’s not necessarily intended to be that complimentary as much as it is an accusation of being excessively picky.

However, in the other hand, I don’t watch a tremendous amount of movies to where I’m remotely close to some wizened film expert whose opinion should be taken beyond a grain of salt, and I’d be the first person to disclaim such when explaining why I liked this movie, or any film that anyone wishes to discuss with me.

Anyway, The Substance: I do believe that it was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time, and it was one of those situations where I’m ¾ through the film and I’m just thinking about how interesting and enjoyable of a watching experience the whole thing had been, and coming to the conclusion that this really has been one of the better films I’ve seen in a long time.

It’s interesting too, because I recall this movie came out quite some time ago (2024), long enough to where I remember it being talked about on The Howard Stern Show, when I still had a SiriusXM preview active,  since there’s a tremendous amount of skin shown in the film.  But for people like me, if it’s not available on a streaming service, it might as well not exist, and just recently did it makes its way onto HBO Go Max Max, thus coming into official existence as far as I was concerned, and mythical wife went ahead and started up when we were at one of those weird crossroads where we didn’t want to start another show, and just wanted something singular and hopefully entertaining to be a pallet cleanser in between shows, and for me it was one of those welp, it’s started, time to watch it, experiences.

From start to finish, I found the film to be cinematographically wonderful, with lots of colorful and aesthetically stimulating shots and scenes, the art direction was inspiring and I loved the whole branding mission The Substance parent company embarked on with their dedication to branding everything they produced as far as packaging and messaging went.  The score was catchy and I enjoyed the rhythmic techno beat that seemed to permeate throughout the whole film.

The word I’d use to best describe The Substance is “visceral” because man, do they not shy away from close-in macro shooting of anything from slovenly scarfing down shrimp cocktails, administering stitches, to all sorts of gruesome, gory, taboo acts that make people like me cringe and/or whip out my phone and try to look away instead of watching more.

And of course, the story was thought-provoking and poignant and if it makes me think about life, and what I’d do in such circumstances, then I think it’s a case of upper echelon storytelling.

The ending section of the film goes so off the rails and bonkers, that I have to imagine that it was probably a wildly entertaining sequence to have been present in a theater full of people when it occurred.  And when it concludes, I was left having felt entertained, satisfied and in an overall good headspace because I had been entertained and inspired, and eager to sing the praises of the film for succeeding at all of the above.

I told mythical wife after we were done watching it, that I thought that this was probably the best movie I’d seen the whole year, and in the grand spectrum of things, it really was one of the better films that I’ve seen in a long time.  I still think about it, and one of the biggest compliments I could give a film is that if I were to walk into a room and it were on, I’d watch it again without much complaint about needing to better utilize my limited free time and watch things that I hadn’t seen before.

I always knew Ken Rosenthal was a little prick off-camera

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Yahoo: FOX sports reporter, Ken Rosenthal, getting dragged on the internet for his behavior of inadvertently knocking over a photographer and giving him a death stare instead of any sort of apology or help getting up

I’d be willing to wager that lots of baseball fans whom might have a shred of similar thinking to I might, probably all agree that there’s something about Ken Rosenthal that probably gives off this air of potential dick.  And then seeing video evidence of him accidentally trucking some poor Brewers photographer, and then instead of any sort of offering to help or motion of remorse, he just stands glaring down at a prone person on their back, uncomfortably long, before returning to conduct an on-field post-game interview; that’s all the internet needed, to race to the conclusion that most of us probably already hypothesized – Ken Rosenthal is a douche.

I mean just look at him, with his vast collection of dorky bow ties and his spray tans and bleached teeth.  Always ready with an artificial smile for the camera.  I get that he’s in media, and he’s trying to cultivate a brand for himself, so that he’ll always remain employed and not lose his job to some hotties working their way up in sports journalism.  But there’s always been this air of arrogance and inflated sense of entitlement that he belongs in MLB reporting or something that I can’t really capture in writing, but just trust me bro, it’s there kind of feelings.

Like, if you were to ask him about baseball in general, I bet he wouldn’t be able to name all 30 MLB squads, or be able to snap back with a favorite player if asked.  There’s just something about his whole presentation and existence that seems fake and artificial and just like this dorky little brother syndrome of clinging to MLB coverage that nobody would really miss if he were gone,

And then he has to go and get caught on video, reacting abruptly and as genuine as a quick reaction makes us do, and of course he gets a pass for running into a person, everyone in existence has done that before.  But it’s the death stare, and the disrespect, and the sheer lack of regard for another human being that has gotten the internet up in arms, and I am here for the Ken Rosenthal dragging, because the Braves suck, and it’s shit like this and all the Dodgers’ close no-hitters getting fucked that sustain my interest in a fledgling baseball season.

Seriously, the way Rosenthal was glaring down at this poor photographer, the closest thing I could liken it to was when Scottie Pippen dunked all over Patrick Ewing in the 94 playoffs, and then stood over him and glared down.  That’s the level of disrespect I gathered from this five second moment of him, and it entertains me tremendously seeing how such did not go unnoticed from the rest of the internet as well, and the ensuing reactions from all over the internet.

Especially funny are all the other rando people on the internet all basically saying the same shit I am of, I knew he was a [pejorative] all along, and then they cite the same shit that I did, most notably the bow ties.

Either way, I’m sure some calculated and hackneyed apology that nobody is going to buy is on the way, but as far as blunders of the 2025 MLB season, as entertained as I was by asshole Ken Rosenthal, I don’t think he’s going to have a snowball’s chance in hell at toppling Philly Karen.

White Lotus S3 probably fucking with #TRYHARDSZN2025

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the thing, this article came up in my routine searches for #TRYHARDs to write about, about how Duke’s acceptance rate has hit an all-time low, where only 3.67% of applicants get accepted.  I mean, sports bias and perception bias on account of sports, aside, Duke is a fine educational institution, and the name holds a tremendous amount of weight in the world for those who have gone there, and graduated from the university.

But even outside of the world of sport, the Duke brand holds an abysmal reputation and is generally reviled by pretty much everyone except those people who have gone to Duke, graduated from Duke, or financially supported by someone who went to Duke.  There’s a general reputation that Duke is snooty, white-bred, arrogant, insufferable and all sorts of pejoratives meant to demean Duke, but it never really mattered, because all the people who are pro-Duke exist on some sort of weird island where nobody else seems to matter.

Which is why it seems so appropriate and fitting that Duke has seemingly decided to gatekeep to a new career high, accepting fewer students than they’ve ever done, and I have to feel that such is probably surprising to absolutely nobody at all, considering their general reputation and the political climate that’s emboldened racists to let their bigot flags fly high and proudly.

Why I decided to start a post about it is completely beyond me considering I don’t really have much else to say about the topic, but in all honesty the reason I wanted to, was so I could post a screen grab of White Lotus S3, where the character Timothy Ratliff, played by Jason Isaacs is basically losing his marbles, but every time he goes into one of his suicidal fantasies, he’s always wearing a t-shirt with a huge-ass DUKE wordmark on it.

After the last episode, I remarked to mythical wife that I’m sure Duke is (facetiously) thrilled to see their school’s name on the shirt of a criminal embezzler who is becoming suicidal, and as someone who enjoys seeing Duke fail in any capacity, it brings me great amusement to see it happening in the show.

And the funniest thing is that my hypothesis was proven correct when searching for an adequate screen grab to pair with this post, and Googling “Tim Ratliff White Lo-“ auto fills in the rest of “tim ratliff white lotus duke shirt” and all sorts of articles and spot-on screen caps of Tim Ratliff with a gun to his head with his DUKE shirt on are immediately returned, and there are numerous articles detailing the university’s general displeasure at the show that a Duke man is both a criminal and suicidal.

But yeah, I’m not surprised that Duke’s not happy about it, because the Ratliff family is proudly North Carolinian, and boasts how dad is Duke, mom is UNC, eldest son is Duke, I don’t remember which Piper went to, but how Lochte is still deciding between the two, but it’s clear that those who were Dookies are clearly vapid unhinged white people, with one of them becoming suicidal.  And I love the validation of my off-remark hypothesis.

So at this point, I have no choice but to continue on with making this post, because it succeeds at taking shots at Duke, as well as put over White Lotus as a show, because season 3 has been entertaining and has demonstrated HBO’s ability to get something that isn’t Game of Thrones or Games of Thrones-adjacent in order to anchor down that Sunday at 9 pm time slot.

I am in the wrong segment of this industry

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Forbes: Walmart “rebrands” for the first time in nearly 20 years, response is predictable but justifiable

Often times I get pegged of being jaded or pessimistic about the design industry.  Why are you in it then?  If you don’t like it, do something else with your life.  And so on, and so on.

Well, this is a prime example of why I, and other designers end up the way we do, is when we hear about the richest companies on the planet, dumping millions of dollars into rebranding efforts, that in this case are literally taking their old logo and adding 1-2 points of stroke around it, and then calling it rebrand.

By the way, this Sisyphus-ian effort cost $1.25 million dollars.

Honestly, in the history of rebrands, $1.25M isn’t the worst or highest dollar amount sunk into one, but considering the sheer lack of effort that went into this, it’s still pretty noteworthy, and undoubtedly chalks up to be a classic example of egregious corporate waste of money.

For years, I’ve always called the Walmart star “the butthole” because let’s be real here, it basically looked like a little yellow sphincter, and I figured it was apropos that they did that, considering the sheer amounts of fucking they did to the market, economy and small business.  Also, I personally think Walmart sucks ass as a whole, so there’s that association too.

I don’t really know or can fathom why Walmart felt the need to rebrand in the first place, but I guess if those in the world of business feel  if you’re not constantly evolving, you’re dying, shit like redundant, unnecessary and minimal effort rebrands gets accusatory eyes off your nuts for a minute and makes it look like they’re doing something, other than fucking the world of commerce and getting a bunch of old white men richer by the hour.

Seriously though, there’s really not as much to rant about as I felt there could’ve been; that’s just how little effort that Walmart put into this rebrand.  They literally just pressed increase stroke around both the butthole as well as the wordmark, and the end result is a bolder wordmark, and a butthole that has appeared to have gotten a little more clenched.

There’s an easy joke about the shitshow that 2025 and beyond seems like it’s going to be, leading to clenched anoos-es throughout ‘Murica, but I don’t get the impression that Walmart as a company isn’t necessarily in opposition to the parties that might be leading to these tighter assholes, so I don’t think it really works.

Perhaps it’s more representative to how the company is a bunch of tightwad fucks who sinch and clench and choke out small businesses throughout the world, squeezing all the way to their assholes, which is ultimately what the butthole represents.

Either way, I don’t shop there, and I actively go out of my way to typically avoid them when I can.  I like protecting my butthole literally and metaphorically, and don’t wish to support companies that go out their way to raze the buttholes of the people; as well as put out shitty creative and branding.

Fuzzy the Clingstone: as if it were going to be anything remotely interesting

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Braves’ AA-affiliate Columbus Clingstones announce the name of their mascot – Fuzzy

Naturally, I didn’t expect much when I found out that the Columbus Clingstones were seeking out a name for their anamorphic peach mascot.  Not that they’re being forced by the Braves like they once used to, but being a Braves affiliate still means they’re not going to do anything remotely interesting or willing to rock the boat.  I didn’t know, nor did I really care to look into what the other options were,* but considering “Fuzzy” won out, I can’t imagine that they were possibly anything competitively intriguing.

*Fuzzy, Pit, Stoney and Cobbler; yep, nothing exciting

Fuzzy is the name that a three-year old toddler names their favorite stuffed bear.  Or any sort of stuffed thing that comes into their possession that they declare in two seconds that they want to have forever and is already their best friend.  I love my kids, but they’re still too young to be coming up with some seriously clever and/or meta thinking names for the things they want to name yet, but they’re also four and three years old, and I have a hard time believing that of the alleged 675 fan suggestions, they were all toddlers.

Unsurprising though, considering the lukewarm response to naming themselves the Clingstones, a term that most people outside of the southeast have never even heard of, that they would go with an absolute snoozefest of a name like Fuzzy.

I was hoping that the Clingstones would’ve carried on a trope started by the AAA-affiliate of the Braves, when they were crowdsourcing for a new name; they came up with four finalists, had a voting period, and when the vote was over, they announced a name that wasn’t even one of the options to begin with, the Stripers.  In all fairness, the Stripers was way better than all of the available options so it wasn’t all for the worst, and considering what options the people of Columbus had to pick from, it would’ve been both hilarious and productive if the same kind of thing happened here as well.

Frankly, as much as I like the actual mascot of Fuzzy (what can I say, I’m a sucker for anamorphic food mascots), I hate the name.  It would’ve been great if they had their silly little voting period, and then in the end, went ahead and declared that the name of the mascot be Clinger, the Clingstone.

And with a name like that, it can create all sorts of room for interpretation, but most prevalently the fact that a clinger is an allegory for a little turd that is stuck to a creature’s butt, which seems appropriate for the absolute flop of a naming rebrand the Columbus baseball organization did.

It’s like, I really like the colors, the mascot, the general aesthetic of the team; but the names Clingstones and Fuzzy the mascot are just colossal whiffs.  It’s like I wish the team could borrow the Time Stone from Dr. Strange or Thanos, rewind just far back enough to where they got to the point where the brand kid was complete but didn’t have a name, and just re-did reality to where they might have gone with other names before the Clingstones and subsequently, Fuzzy.

But at least it served as impetus to create an image of Fuzzy the Clingstone being the clinger that the names of the team are in my opinion, and poop jokes sell, in my little slice of the internet.

Jaguar’s new logo = Publix Supermarkets

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Trent Crimm, The Independent: Jaguar unveils new branding and logo and the crowd goes mild but eventually more into ire

I don’t particularly care much for Jaguar as far as cars go, they’ve always been a little pretentious and overrated as far as my tastes are concerned, but I also wouldn’t put them in the category of cars that I wouldn’t ever get if I had the means necessary.  Their aesthetics aren’t really my cup of tea, but I can like what I see on a paper when it comes to performance specs.

That being said, put me in the camp of people whose interest in the car company most definitely trended downward upon seeing their rebranding.  Jaguar becoming JaGUar, with this absolute masterclass of horseshit spinning from their corresponding press release:

seamlessly blended upper and lower case characters in visual harmony”

Nah, of course it’s not as cerebral as that.  The designer, and I use that term loosely, didn’t like the way the lowercase G looked and didn’t like the extra stroke that the lower case U had and went with upper case variants which looked more seamless; and then the right VPs, with their wealth of artistic credibility, happened to like the way it looked, gave it the green light, and away we go.

Looking at it made me immediately think about Publix Supermarkets’ logo and possibly the Beats by Dre identity,* but mostly Publix, and it always amazes me when the brand designers of the world don’t really take any time to research the logos of the world and take a modicum of effort to not look like someone else’s identity.  Because then rogue designers like me can’t clown on them and make the easy swap of logo into what they really look like, and if I’m someone with any clout, or at least tempted to try and engage Publix on social media and post this graphic just to see their reaction.

*also there’s this regional adult store chain that also utilizes a similar typeface that I always see billboards for while driving to Disney World that is somewhat related to the jaguar animal kekeke

All the same, it’s kind of sad.  I might not have been that high on Jaguar as a brand, but their identity was pretty unmistakable, with the silhouette of the jaguar leaping over a fairly nondescript bold all-caps wordmark.  But there’s this overarching cry in the design community, that modern branding is all metamorphosizing into a very diluted pool of vanilla “safe” logos that are all looking the same and homogenized into these blobs of non-personality.  Serifs and symbols have become enemies, variations of Helvetica Neue and Gotham are overtaking visual identities everywhere, and with JaGUar’s rebranding, another long-standing reputable brand has deliberately chosen to converge with the masses and adopt a boring, vanilla, forgettable identity, once the initial reactions and internet ridicule all die down.

That being said, I think it’s only a matter of time before JaGUar releases some turd on wheels that’s a hybrid crossover CUV that looks just like a Corolla Cross or a Buick Encore, and then we will truly know that JaGUar has really given up on trying to compete in the market as much as they’re just trying to blend in and hide in plain sight.

I mean with a logo that looks like this, they’re already halfway there.

NXT’s new blets are a let down

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In case you missed it, as part of the show’s official launching on theCW Network, NXT has rebranded and as a part of the rebranding, have unveiled new and updated championship blets.

In one hand, this should’ve been predictable if I were to even think of the possibility of redesign, seeing as how for the last few years, through NXT 2.0, and whatever the gold logo’d variant after it was called, the title blets had remained almost entirely the same from their last versions from the Triple H black and gold branded NXT; most identifiable by the giant X’s in the middle of the logo on all titles in circulation.

But on the other hand, I’m very unimpressed by the new blet designs for their top men’s and women’s titles, and I can only imagine how vanilla and boring the tag team blets are going to be, and possibly the North American blets if they choose to redesign considering how little the NXT logos were on those.

Renderings of the blets outside of the shiny television lights don’t do them any favors, and you can see how generally lacking in thought and design there is behind the new blets.  They’re regurgitating the straps from the black and gold era which is clearly dictating the design of the plates as a whole, and there’s really not a whole lot of innovation with these updated designs.

NXT grew to a point where NXT championship reigns were being widely accepted as world title reigns for superstars fortunate enough to get to that level, but with the blets looking like this, I’m thinking that they’re reverting back to looking like developmental champions rather than actual world title caliber.

Art nerd philosophy [one] is that fewer things are indicative of mediocrity than constantly rebranding and changing the aesthetics, because changes are only being made at a superficial level, and not necessarily to the more important functional and systemic ones.  NXT 2.0 was a pretty comprehensive rebrand from top to bottom, all the way to execution, but it really wasn’t when 2.0 ended, and other than moving networks, I can’t really imagine what functional and systemic changes they have in store for theCW-NXT (CWNXT?).

But as observed above, they’d been operating NXT 2.0 with even older NXT title blets for so long, that by now a full comprehensive rebranding isn’t necessarily a bad idea either, it’s just that I don’t care much for the “design” of the identity or the blets themselves because of:

Art nerd philosophy [two] is that on a long enough timeline, everyone’s logo and identity seems to inevitably turn into one of being in Arial/Helvetica, specifically a variant of Helvetica Neue.  There are countless examples out there of notable companies and corporations that have rebranded for almost no justifiable reasons, but always tend to take a timeless classic logo, and make an updated version where any script or character is stripped and is usually replaced by some boring, soulless, vanilla sans-serif font, usually wrapped in some rhombus.

NXT is no exception to this rule, with the new logomark being literally the letters in Helvetica Neue 95 Black with a little bit of manual kerning to have the characters butt into each other, but is otherwise another example of a boring, vanilla and soulless rebranding.

Why companies are so hell bent to not go back to logos that worked is beyond me, Burger King has reverted back to an old iteration of their older logos, why can’t NXT go back in time and revert back to the Hunter-era of NXT’s branding?  Then the blets wouldn’t have had to have been re-designed and recreated, but typing that out I’m reminded of the fact that the goal is to push and sell merchandise, so I supposed going back in time is kind of counterproductive to that objective.

Either way, even if I had the fluid disposable income to get more blets for the collection I can’t display, I have zero interest or desire to pick up a replica of this new CWNXT championship blet.  My NXT collection is already well-represented with a Hunter-era NXT championship and North American championship, and I don’t see any need to add to it from a mediocre pool.