By now I’m sure you’ve heard of or at least seen Pepsi’s newfangled logo. If you’re like me, you first saw it on the Brand New weblog, which discusses new or re-branded corporate identities. At first, people thought it was a hoax, and then it became obvious that it was real when Pepsi started sending the new cans to influential bloggers. They launched the new ID in time for the Super Bowl. Evidently, the mark is supposed to be a smile, and the associated logos for the various brand extensions (Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Max, etc.) are intended to be grins, giggles, smirks, etc.

I think the logo itself is fine, almost beautiful. According to the Pepsi Gravitational Field PDF document thats serves as a sort of style guide (which may or may not be an after-the-fact justification of the entire rebranding effort) the simple mark was constructed via an elaborate method using the Golden Mean proportion. That aspect of it is incredibly awesome. If you can pull off that kind of geometry in a logo you have major street cred in my book. But after the first few pages, it gets pretty ridiculous.

However, I have two problems with the rebranding.

Problem #1: It’s not different enough from the old logo. Maybe it’s that the colors are the same, or the fact that it’s a circle with two red and blue “halves” separated by a white midsection. Along the same lines, there are too many subtle variations of it for the brand extensions. Plus, it makes me think of an airline. See the wing in the negative space there?

Problem #2: They had to sell it with some of the most pretentious marketing nonsense I’ve ever read. I actually understand the stuff about constructing it with the Golden Mean and using slick design principles, but the styleguide document is just a bit rediculous and rather pretentious. (I do wonder if it’s real at all, or if it’s some sort of hoax.) And all that stuff connecting the Pepsi logo and gravity’s relativistic influence on space-time? Puh-leeze. This marketing gobbledygook is an art-school death spiral: it sounds like something an overzealous art student would write.

The guys over at Read Between the Leading have some interesting things to say about this in episode 2 of their podcast. (Their show is worth checking out, by the way.)