MY LIFE IN IMAGES

With it being Christmas ‘n’ all I though this adapated ‘No Stopping’ sign seemed very appropriate, good on those that take the infrastructure of our regulated world and shove two fingers up at them.

On another note, coming in 2010 is my attempt at the daily photo concept; 365:2010. I will be posting a photo to my Flickr account every day, the rule is that the image must have been taken by me on that particular day. Being one of the iPhone owning masses I’ll be taking advantage of the Flickr app.

Then once a month I’ll be posting my favourite images to this blog. I think it’ll be a challenge to find something interesting every day, but then again does it have to be ‘interesting’, can it just be every day, can it just illustrate a part of my daily life…guess I’ll find out soon enough.

I stumbled across this poster one morning which had been left on the door of Eleven nightclub on Oxford St in Sydney, and found the long list of entry rules quite amusing. The club was formerly known as Boutique and before that Goodbar, both had a pretty bad reputation with Goodbar getting headlines after a shooting rampage.

Obviously they’re trying to clean up the image and I found the list of entry rules pretty amusing. For those that don’t know a ‘Rats Tail’ is a hairstyle where the majority of the persons hair is short or shaved but there is a long ‘tail’ of hair at the back, an example of which can be seen on Wikipedia. Also love the fact that you won’t get in with a man bag, probably to prevent drugs and weapons getting in the club. Considering the type of people that frequent these sort of clubs on Oxford St I’d be amazed if anyone got in!

Time for another logo update, this time it’s Pepsi, and with a logo change comes an update of package design. These two examples were found in a local supermarket, going left to right, old Pepsi can, new Pepsi can, old Pepsi Max bottle, new Pepsi Max bottle. The change is finally being rolled out in Australia after launching in the US earlier in the year and being rolled out across the world, the UK got the re-brand in August.

As you can see the red, white and blue logo has had a major update and the Pepsi wordmark changes from italicised caps to a circular lowercase font. The introduction over here is a little different to the US, take a look at the rebrand gallery and you’ll notice that the logo is slightly different between standard Pepsi, Pepsi Max and Diet Pepsi products (the white element is thinner in diet products and bigger in the max product, clever ey!).

There’s tons of info out there on the web about the rebrand exercise (though the Australian site isn’t that great or up to date!) so I won’t repeat it all here but if you’re a design geek like me then you can find out more at pepsico.com and in this document detailing how the logo evolved.

Now I’ll be the first to admit I’m a complete design geek, I notice when a company changes its logo or typeface, I notice when packages change design or when a business is rebranded. What interests me most is the thought process which goes behind such changes. Unfortunately the general public aren’t generally party to those processes. So here’s the first in what may become an occasional look at the world of package design.

Starting with Milo (above), an Australian icon first created in 1934. So what are the major changes between the old (left) and new package designs? Well surprisingly the logo is slightly smaller, cricket boy has been reduced and flipped, ‘Low GI’ appears to have dropped out of favour in packaging buzzwords, however promoting natural ingredients such as ‘Malted Barley’ with the addition of a description and image is in. ‘Vitamins and Minerals’ are still important but it seems pushing protein benefits is now up there too. The Milo now splashes into the glass of milk rather than just floating on top, the shade of green has darkened slightly and the subtle cricket game background has been dropped.

Now to Sprite Zero, conveniently I found these two bottles side-by-side on the shelf at a supermarket (old design on the left). Again logo size has been reduced and had a slight overhaul with a font change, the lemon & lime motif is now more prominent and a background splash has been added. The designers seem to have decided that no one cares whether Sprite Zero is ‘caffeine free’ as it’s been dropped, ‘No artificial colours or flavours’ is still important though. Background colour has also changed from a blue/green gradient to a blue/grey gradient.

Coca-Cola Company package design seems to differ all around the world and the Aussie version above still differs from the current US packaging. It also has a couple of other brand names, known as ‘Diet Sprite‘,  ‘Diet Sprite Zero‘ or ‘Sprite Light’ in some other countries.

So this story will have made it’s way round the web pretty quickly as Sydney woke up to what looked like life on Mars on Weds 23rd Sep. It was actually the wind that woke me at 6am but as I glanced out of the window I saw this bizarre orange glow. At first glance I thought it was fog, but with the wind there was no way it could be, so after switching on the radio I discovered I was experiencing one of Sydney’s worst dust storms in 70 years.

It looked like the end of the world, a nuclear winter, the orange glow being caused by the low angle of the sun at that time of the morning. As the sun rose the sky took on a less dramatic light beige hue. Stories about the storm are on news sites the world over and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter were flooded with images from camera phones. This multimedia gallery from the Sydney Morning Herald pretty much sums up the day.