Tag: graphic design

WTF is AEW doing #387

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first saw this shirt, I thought it was a joke, a bad photoshop from some shitty wrestling shitposting meme account or something.  But nope, it’s very much real, and actually available to you for the low, low price of $29.99 plus tax and shipping, which means it’s basically a plain white t-shirt for somewhere just under $40.

Of course I know that there are all sorts of brand name designers out there who have been peddling plain white t-shirts for upwards of $100+, but they’re often times players in the egregious fashion industry, whom most of them have earned the right to hawk their shitty wares for exorbitant prices, and people not smart enough to realize that they’re being fleeced will actually buy them.  But yeah, them, they’re not a professional wrestling promotion, whom most equate their product and their merchandise as tantamount to carny shit, and only exist at that price range solely on the basis of inflation.

Yes, I can see the Property of the Death Riders wordmark on them, anyone (with a magnifying glass) can see it, but the point remains is that AEW’s merch team has basically posted up the absolute bare minimum effort in an actual product available to the public.

In the past, I’ve called out other bullshit cash grab products like Faarooq’s DAMN shirt which is basically just the word DAMN written on the chest in Rockwell Bold, and the B-Team’s signature shirt, which was obviously deliberately shittily made to help sell the fact that Axel and Bo were B-tier talents, but still turned into a screen print and peddled for $30 a pop (plus tax and shipping).

Well, Property of the Death Riders joins that club of some of the worst wrestling shirts in history, without any question at all.  Like, I’m becoming desensitized to a lot of the weird and silly shit that AEW does that I have a hard time grasping because I grew up with the WWE, but to offer up a plain white shirt with the tiniest of logos as an actual product definitely stands out in a sea of weird and silly shit, at least in my mind.

Here’s the funny thing though, as I’m typing this out, there’s a part of me that actually does admire the fact that in spite of the overall bullshit this shirt really is, as far as utility and being able to wear it out in public outside of wrestling shows or flaunting fandom, this shirt actually probably a GOAT.  Being a plain white t-shirt, it’s a perfect undershirt, and the lack of any design whatsoever on it means that there’s zero concern of any design being visible behind an opaque white dress shirt.  And 10 times out of 10, whenever I’d be wearing a plain white t-shirt, it’s tucked into dress pants, and the dorky little Death Riders wordmark wouldn’t be a factor at all.

But I’m not really fan of white t-shirts in general, because white fabric is like this ticking time bomb where they’ll slowly turn yellow from absolutely no other reason than existing, and any exposure to air, water, moisture accelerates it, and even more so when exposed to human oils or perspiration.  I literally had a few white tees that were still in their Ziploc bags, completely unopened and unworn, and when the day came where I felt the need for one, and ripped open the sack, it was yep, yellowed with age.

White t-shirts are basically for weddings and funerals, or any other instances where I’d need a specifically white t-shirt underneath a more priority garment.

Back to the Death Riders white shirt, the jokes just write themselves, as far AEW’s fanbase is concerned.  The schlubs who will be willing to plunk down the cash to get these bad boys don’t have to worry about them yellowing from age, because they’ll rapidly turn from the sweat, nacho cheese from Daily’s Place, and vape juice they’ll be exposed to, accelerated whenever they see Toni Storm, Harley Cameron or Skye Blue.

All these observations, without even having to even scratch the surface of what failure the whole Death Riders faction has turned into, because when they formed, they had a ton of momentum, but as is often the case with Tony Khan booking, there’s no focus, no end game or no execution, and all members of the group have been swirling around doing dick and butt for weeks, with no end in sight.

It really is incredible how Jon Moxley in NJPW took his Death Rider persona and absolutely slayed over there, but bringing the name to AEW and making it a group has been absolute death to the brand and identity of it completely.

And I don’t really get it either, the whole white t-shirt thing was Bryan Danielson’s, and the Death Riders basically smothered him and killed his career, and suddenly Mox picks up the whole white shirt thing, acting like a jacked psychotic Andrew WK or something?

As the subject of these posts goes, jesus, wtf?

Cobra Kai, fin

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the weekend, when I was having one of those nights where I didn’t feel like I had any real time to do anything, so I was instead just sitting around dicking around on my phone min-maxing my Duolingo XP as well as playing Fire Emblem Heroes, my au pair pokes her head into the media room and asks if I had started watching the final installment of Cobra Kai S6.

I looked at her perplexed and asked if it had dropped yet, and she said that it just released.  I looked at the clock and immediately grabbed the remote, and I said, why the fuck are we not watching it right now then?

We ended up watching four episodes and then it was 1 am, and I said that I needed to stop so that I wouldn’t be butt-tired in the morning, and that I wanted to save the final episode for the following day, preferably in a scenario where mythical wife wasn’t aware that we were going to watch it in front of her, since she’s such a giant fan of the show like we are.

Mission accomplished, and with that, the saga that is Cobra Kai is finally completed.

Frankly, it’s a show that desperately needed finality, not just because it’s the worst show in existence that had no right to be good as it was, but as is the case with any show that features child actors, it’s been like 6-7 years since the show started, and all the youth talent was growing the fuck up faster than kudzu, and the show needed to wrap up ASAP, before Dimitri grew to 7 ft. tall and Kenny turned into Terry Crews.

[Obviously at this point, spoiler alert is on, because I’m probably going to say shit that would be construed as spoilers]

Continue reading “Cobra Kai, fin” →

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.

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.

Let’s talk about the WWE’s new tag blets

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In one of those I should’ve seen it coming but I didn’t, the WWE has recently redesigned and unveiled new tag team championship blet designs.  Over the last few years, almost all the blets have been systematically been redesigned from top to bottom, except for the tag blets, which were still red for RAW and blue for Smackdown. 

Blets being in the middle of a reign didn’t seem to matter for when to unveil new designs, as Roman Reigns, Asuka and Rhea Ripley all received the new versions of the blets that they had held, but for whatever reasons, the Usos having the combined tag team championships on lockdown didn’t warrant swapping of those designs, but seeing as they were broken up and sent off to different shows seemed as good as time as any for the E to finally unveil new titles.

When the new World Tag Team Championships were unveiled on RAW, one I was happy for the Miz and R-Truth, two WWE lifers who are the consummate pros who do anything and everything they are asked for, do it well, and always manage to get absolutely anything over.  But two, my knee-jerk reaction to these blets were that I was relieved to see that they were finally gold blets again, seeing as how fewer things made the tag titles feel lesser-tier over the last 10+ years than the fact that they were bronze and then silver plates.

The shade of gold, amount of flourish and the weird griffin chimaera creatures made me think that this perhaps could’ve been a previous version or option of the World Heavyweight championship blet that ultimately ended up looking like a spin-off of the old WCW big gold blet in terms of its general shape and composition.

But overall, I do really like the new World Tag Team blets, except for one thing – the font they used on it.  Not digging the spiky, Glaive-like typeface they used, and it looks like they’re trying to be a 2005 RAW graphic package with it.  Furthermore, the type is just too fucking large, and much like my general aesthetic preference when it comes to clothing, I think when apparel requires too much text to explain it, then it’s design that is not optimal.

If the fonts were smaller, I could overlook the undesirable typeface selection, but overall, I’m pleased with the way the new World tag blets look.  Not sure if I’d want to own one, but typically a really good discount has gotten me possession of other blets I’ve felt similarly about.

Obviously, once RAW had unveiled new tag blets, among the first thoughts I had was pondering what Smackdown was going to do, because it was obvious that they were going to get a redesign as well.  But the question was, was it going to be carbon copies of the RAW titles, but with blue paint behind the globe and type?  Or was it going to be something completely independent?

Fortunately, the answer was just days away, when Smackdown unveiled the WWE Tag Team championships, with blets that looked completely different from their RAW counterparts.  Immediately, my eyes noticed the familiar shape of the center plate, which was an obvious throwback to older tag team blet designs, that had what I like to jokingly call the nutsack shape, because for whatever reason, the bottom has two bulges like a pair of testicles.

Regardless of the homoerotic comparison, my knee-jerk reaction was still positive.  I liked that it was a completely different design, and this will prevent any future embarrassing title swaps in future draft storylines.  It’s general design is much more muted and subdued than the World tag blets with its design being more etched and not molded.  In doing so, it does look like a cheaper blet in comparison, but as far as design goes, it’s a preferable design over its counterpart.

The font treatment is much more subdued and exactly how I prefer it, and the throwback shape of it is pretty much all that it needs to have to be the preferable of blets between the two.

What it all boils down to is if I had to pick one, which would I go with, and that would be the Smackdown WWE Tag Team blets.  The homage to the classic design is fantastic, and even though the World is the more detailed and nicer looking blet, the font is a turn-off for me

Either way, I’m glad to see that the E has redesigned both, because in the future when the tag blets are used as a prop or a means to reward two mildly over singles guys, at least they’ll look good holding some actual gold straps instead of silver-plated toy-looking blets.

Not my MiLB logo

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Apparently I missed this way back from September: but Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball have agreed to change the official logo of Minor League Baseball

And of course this wouldn’t be a post if I didn’t, but I absolutely hate it, thanks.

Fewer things are a sign of mediocrity and spinning wheels like a logo rebranding.  This was not a case like the Cleveland Indians really needing to get rid of a horrifically racist mascot, this was the case of some bored corporate stooges looking for things that weren’t broken and decided to fix them anyway, to justify their existences.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the previous MiLB logo.  It was subtle, it was understandable, and most importantly, it was just different enough to where the shape and brand positioning of it was always consistent to MLB standards, but the visual identity of the icon itself was different enough for those looking to understand that this was Minor League and not the MLB icon that any sports fan or casual could understand.

In one of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken with my mom, I’m wearing the old MiLB logo generic shirt.

Now this new crappy logo is basically identical to the MLB logo, except the batter is aligned to the left, and instead of a baseball coming towards the batter, it now looks like the batter has sat looking at four pitches that are now past him, and considering the escalating rate of strikeouts throughout the last half-century, the guy in the logo has probably struck-out, as much as the logo itself does in my opinion.

I hate to say it, but there are a lot of baseball fans that aren’t particularly intelligent.  The Gwinnett Braves used the excuse that there were people that actually managed to confuse tickets for G-Braves tickets for tickets for the Atlanta Braves, which I didn’t think was really a believable excuse, but I’m also not going to pretend like baseball fans are always the smartest people in the world either.  This new logo is going to 100% confuse people into thinking they’re going to Major League games and buying Major League apparel, but perhaps that really is the end game, and I’m just being hyper critical of a tactic that I think is petty, but is really some corporate shills really living in 2050 and playing chess.

And I don’t understand why they’ve put a color palette behind it, especially of two shades of blue.  MLB logos, especially on apparel, namely baseball caps, often times already ditch their own color palette and adopt the primary and secondary colors of the team, or they just go reverse white, as not to compete with the colors of the teams, especially ones that don’t utilize the navy and red palette of the MLB logo.  This Carolina/Dook blue combo logo just seems odd and uncharacteristic to professional baseball in general, where it seems like the vast majority of teams utilize shades of red, at all levels of the game.  For all the teams like the Blue Rocks or the Stone Crabs or the Pelicans that utilize shades of blue, there are teams like the Redbirds, Nuts, Crawdads and much more where adding a logo of blues into their branding is more like shoehorning a horse’s hoof into a toddler’s shoe.

Either way, I am very much not a fan of the new MiLB logo.  It is uncreative, homogenized, convoluted, and was something that never needed to be updated in the first place.  Not that I’m going to many baseball games at all these days, but a team’s branding is going to have to work just a little bit harder to make me decide to impulsively drop some cash on any team merch if it’s going to have this little blue turd of a brand slapped onto it.

There may be four stars on the logo, but if it were up to me, it would have none.