I ran across this video a while ago and have been meaning to repost it. I have a few minutes today, so here goes. It’s a video by Cincinnati-based designer Adam Ladd. Ladd showed his 5-year-old daughter logos from some of the biggest companies in the world and recorded her responses. It’s surprising at how many she actually gets right…apparently all of those people warning us of the dangers of exposing kids to too much advertising is well warranted. Watch the video and I have a couple of comments after.

Fresh Impressions on Brandmarks (from my 5-year-old)

I think it’s really interesting that his daughter hits not only on the brands that she (presumably) has direct experience with (e.g., Disney and Pepsi, which she refers to as the ‘pop from the pizza place’), but also products that she isn’t a direct consumer of (e.g., Starbucks and BP). It really is impressive that more often than not she either knows the brand name or the category it falls in. It seems to me that the ones that really stick in her mind the most are the simplest, which goes along with what I’ve always believed—simpler is often better. On some of the more complex logos (Boeing, for example), she doesn’t really know what it’s for (I’ll admit that I didn’t know what it was, either), but she just kind of says what she thinks it is.

I appreciated that when she sees the McDonald’s logo, she knows what it is right away, but she also adds something in that I never considered. She says that McDonald’s ‘M’ looks like it’s made up of french fries, which is a connection that I am sure I would have never made. It’s really amazing to see how young minds work sometimes, isn’t it?

My favorite part of the video, hands down, is when she IDs the Greyhound, Jaguar and PUMA logos each as ‘a cheetah,’ one right after the other. I never really thought about how much alike all of those logos looked.

Fun video…hope you liked it.

I saw it posted on Facebook earlier today that Qdoba Mexican Grill is celebrating the grand opening of their 600th restaurant. As I have mentioned previously, Qdoba was one of my clients when first went out on my own. It was probably right around a decade ago when they were still operating as Z-TECA (interestingly, I just realized that there are still a handful of restaurants operating as Z-TECA in Ontario). At the time, they were a small chain with just a handful of stores in Denver and Colorado Springs (I think the first menu I worked on was when they were first moving into the Springs when there were around 6 or 7 total restaurants). Because I worked with them so early in my freelance career, I will forever feel grateful to them as well as connected to them.

I used to love working with them. I’d either drive or ride my bike into downtown Denver…their offices were on Blake Street, if I remember correctly. Above what was something like their third store. I’d meet with their IT & Marketing guy, his name was Oscar and he was a very nice guy. And whenever I’d leave the meeting, Oscar would be sure to slip me a couple of coupons for free burritos. I would have ridden my bike for a meeting every single day as long as Oscar kept giving me free coupons.

Qdoba is one of my favorite restaurants and the day they opened one in Saginaw was a very happy day, although if I ate there as often as I’d like to eat there, I’d probably weigh 300 pounds. Qdoba Mexican Grill is  a great example of building a brand through the consistency and high quality of your product. The interesting thing is that all the while they were building their brand, they didn’t even know what their brand was going to be.

When I first started eating there, they were still called Zuma. After a few years—around the time I started working with them—they had changed their name to Z-TECA. Around five years after that, they settled on Qdoba. So even though their brand name kept changing, they kept delivering on the promise of great food and trusted that if they made the food the focus of the brand, that they wouldn’t have to worry about the name. And here we are, however many years later and their strategy worked great obviously, because they’ve got 600 stores!

Congratulations, Qdoba! I look forward to copy and pasting this entry when you get your 700th, 800th, 900th and 1000th stores open.

Last week, the American Medical Association released a new policy regarding the use of Adobe Photoshop in advertising. The policy hopes to encourage advertisers and people in advertising and fashion industries to work with groups involved in child and adolescent health to come up with guidelines for the use of Photoshop in advertising imagery. Basically, the AMA’s complaint is that the fashion and advertising industries use Photoshop to create unrealistic and unhealthy body images for young people, especially young women. They even cited (although they did not include a link) to a photo where the model’s body was altered so much that her waist was actually narrower than her head.

The AMA isn’t talking about plain, old sloppy Photoshop work like this Katy Perry ad. (Can you spot the bad Photoshop work here?)

No, what the AMA is talking about are ads where women’s bodies are drastically altered to a point where they make the original proportions of the Barbie doll seem realistic. They’re right, advertisers do use Photoshop to create bodies that do not occur in nature. I know this for a fact because I was a part of the problem a few years ago when I worked for a big ad agency. Our number one client was one of the biggest beer companies in the world and we used women in a LOT of our work. Most beer ads feature women because beer drinkers, by and large, are men. So it stands to reason that an attractive spokesmodel is going to get the attention of the guys who are drinking the beer.

In the advertising industry, when you see a photograph of a woman, you can be sure that it’s been gone over pretty carefully with Photoshop (Katy Perry photo notwithstanding). Photos are retouched and have blemishes removed, color is enhanced, flaws in the photo are corrected and so forth. But often, it doesn’t end there…especially in the summer ads where many of the girls are shown wearing bikinis. I can remember getting marked up photo sheets asking to have a woman’s waist reduced, arms and legs “tightened up” a bit, cleaning up shoulders, etc.

So you’d bring this photo into Photoshop and you’d start off by making the standard color and blemish fixes. Then you broke out your clone stamp tool (the Photoshop equivalent of a surgeon’s scalpel) and start chiseling away. I will admit it’s fun work because you are basically creating something that isn’t real and the challenge is to do it in such a way that millions of people (or tens of millions) are going to see it and you’re not going to leave any fingerprints behind. It’s a challenge. In the end, you’d end up with something like the photo below (I could have used a more graphic example, but many of them involved scantily-or-less-clad women, so I went with a family-friendly alternative).

At first glance, what you notice is that the color is much better in the second photo and that the models skin is lightened and blemishes removed. Now look a little closer. Notice on the original photo that her collarbones really stand out? Well, this would never do so let’s just go ahead and airbrush/clone stamp it a little to make them less noticeable. Now what? How about that little bulge on her right side. I know that it’s just her rib cage jutting out a bit from the angle the photographer has her standing at, but I think we should shave a bit off there. So now, instead of going down and cutting inward, it’s a more gentle slope. And to wrap it up, let’s trim her left side, too. As it is, she already looks skinny, but you know what they say about cameras adding pounds? Let’s shave a couple of inches off the left side just to smooth her about a bit. Abracadabra!

This sort of thing goes on all of the time in the industry and it happens with guys, too, but it’s different. I once worked on a big campaign which featured wresting superstar Bill Goldberg. They had all of these intimidating shots of this HUGE guy, but we had to go through and fix those photos too. Not with his physique, though, we had to retouch the grey in his beard. I don’t think the vanity came from the Goldberg camp, though, because if you look at his promo shot below, there’s plenty of grey. I actually believe the creative director on the project thought the no-grey look made him look cooler which meant we’d sell more beer. I want to meet the guy who made his beer purchasing decision based on the lack of grey hair in Goldberg’s beard. To him, I offer a hearty, “You’re welcome, buddy!”

So what’s the answer to all of this? I guess I come down on the side of Photoshop here because it’s one of the most powerful tools in the modern graphic designer’s arsenal (sorry for the mixed metaphor). And like any tool or weapon, they can be very useful or very dangerous in the wrong set of hands. I think that we, as a society, are very quick to point fingers and we spend time looking for someone to blame, but this isn’t Photoshop’s fault.

In the interest of jump starting the blog, I give you this—Cheese or Font? It’s just a silly little website that gives you a name and you have to guess whether it is the name of a cheese or the name of a font. Don’t laugh…it’s harder than you think.

Cheese or Font?

Head over and give it a shot.

Okay, I know that I posted something on Facebook the other day about doing a NCAA tournament-style bracket deciding the games based on the teams’ logos. I actually spent a little time on it and, once I really got into it, realized that many of the team logos consist either primarily or solely of letters. I guess I never really thought about that, but it’s true. Sure, there is some design element to the logos, but it’s kind of boring.

So what I am going to do is the same sort of thing, but with corporate logos which gives me a lot more to work with. There are a few different ways I can do this and I’m still sorting it out, but I’ll get it started either next week or the week after. I know this isn’t a terribly exciting post, but I wanted to mention it just so that nobody thinks I completely blew it off. Stay tuned.