So listen. I know that I am not an expert on things like corporate identity (though I did create a rocking corporate identity package for one of my graphic design classes in college) or marketing (though I did take Marketing 341 one semester in a misguided attempt to explore other moneymaking opportunities considering journalism majors make like 4 dollars a year).
(I am, however, clearly an expert on using parentheses)
But I hate the new Giant logo. See below.
It looks like a sailboat to me. A big colorful sailboat. It does not say “bowls a’plenty” to me, nor does it say “Hey, come shop with us, we’re fresh and clean, look at our updated logo!”
It also screams of unoriginality. Every major company these days is getting a logo similar to this - the old “image on the side, san-serifed font on the other side” treatment. See examples:
See what I’m saying? I love a clean white background more than anything, but this has got to stop at some point.
And you know, I’m not sure that purple, red, yellow and green are really the best color palette choices. It’s almost like they tried to go with straight color wheel pairings but then messed up on the orange-purple option (though that yellow is more like an orange-yellow, I suppose). I think they really nailed the coffin down with their typeface color being purple. Why would you do that?
I had a brief 20 minutes of clear time this evening, which is why I wrote this post to begin with, but then I spent a good five minutes redesigning the new Giant logo. It’s not perfect, but I like to think it’s an improvement at least:
You still get the “bowls a’plenty” ideal, but with a more modern and tied-together color palette. Instead of the text on the side, you get it on the top, which is different (and it would also look more balanced on a plastic grocery bag).
Note - I am a newspaper and web designer, not an actual graphic designer (in spirit, maybe). I took seven graphic design courses in college and averaged a C in all of them (mainly due to my lack of natural drawing ability). No matter how stupid I am with drawing, at the very least, I know not to make my typeface purple.
I much prefer your Giant logo. I never realized the overwhelming lack of creativity until i saw all the sad little logos lined up in this post.
You should send your logo to Giant corporate headquarters. Maybe they’ll adopt it, and it will be the Moses that leads other boring, uniform corporate logos out of the desert of banality.
It took me a while to think about what it even was. But, I confrimed that it is a clorful bowl opf friut. It is supposed to represent a new look for Giant. Looks like giant had some botox done! It looks similar to the NBC logo!
Like yours better!
despise the new giant logo as well. It looks like a bowl of feathers. And the new uniforms…..black and yello? the employess look like bumble bees. Its awful. The new logo must have been from a contest in a kindergarten class or maybe it came from some outdated logo book. YUCK! And to think someone made loads of money to design that awful logo. And PURPLE on the shopping bags? Eeew. I am going back to Safeway.
At least the new logo that was developed didn’t use Avant Garde… cough cough
It’s charmless and sadly becoming as ubiquitious as DIN or even Helvetica!
Ashley,
While I share some of your sentiments regarding the new logo, you have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. There’s currently a new trend in graphic, and specifically, logo design. Graphic design has always been a progressive field that, like art, have gone through many phases: (Renaissance, avant garde, modernism, post-modernism….etc) The computer has made it much easier to create designs that were traditionally done by hand-made letters, types, etc. There’s even a shift in typography. Even in printing, the letterpress gave way to the offset press, and sooner or later, these presses will give way to the newer digital machines we’re starting to see at our neighborhood Kinkos. As a graphic designer and photographer, I was adamant about Digital SLR Cameras, but I realized their value after I made the switch.
In summary, some of these logos are not well-thought about, and could be better, but I think the bigger picture is the shift in design and new trends that are taking over the industry. Hope this helped…