So the other night at the supermarket (do I know how to spend an exciting Saturday night or what?) I noticed the new labels for both Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. I don't know if bad design to bad design is really worth a blog post, but they both have moved in a positive direction (albeit slightly) and given how large a public face they both have, I figure its worth noting. Diet Coke has always been plagued by a clunky logo design. The latest incarnations seemed to add more and more "stuff" in an effort to dress it up, having the opposite result. The new logo uses a new typeface for "Coke" that will quickly date itself, but to their credit, they have removed all the beveled edges and color gradations and extra nonsense. They've also considerably cleaned up the backgrounds. Cleaner, better, gooder. Now, if someone could just teach them to kern. That gap between the o and the k is anything but ok. Meanwhile, Diet Pepsi has similarly toned down the cheesy factor of their labels, but not too much. Gone is the script and the inexplicable diagonal type, but the new slightly cleaner type is still the victim of unnecessary extrusions and outlines. The result is a little more masculine, which makes sense given both drinks efforts to chase the male market (I never did understand the move from the old white cans to powder blue - hardly the way to attract that demographic). Still a long way from the great Diet Pepsi design of the 1980's, but a small step in the right direction.

jbd blog: design light