Light rail stop design fail.

What should be protected from rain?

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I want to believe!

A new toy would help bringing up more Mulders.

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Starving since 1973

Starving since 1973

“Starving Students“. The branding idea for the moving company is great, just as “Two men and a truck” is.

The history of “Starving Students” starts back in 1973 when a few students decided to offer moving services to pay off their tuition in college.

Starving students… These days college students are starving on purpose to look cool. If they need money for college, some of them would record and sell home brew adult videos rather than moving someone’s household crap. Click here for the full story at DesignFail.org

Bull balls photo from the road

Road picture

Bull balls photo from the road

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Geico Real Savings

Geico (big auto insurance company in the US) is an endless source of my “design fail” inspiration. Looks like they have some internal branding issues and desperately choose between “cave man” and “wet talking lizard with attitude” (ok, ok, “Geko”) approaches. Both fail, IMO.

I took this picture on the road last week and made some quick Photoshop on it:

Real savings

“Shadow: an imitation of something” (Dictionary and Thesaurus – Merriam-Webster)

The story is now available at DesignFail.org

Symantec: Throw your laptop away

Symantec came up with fresh idea to advertise their Norton software outdoors:

Throw it away

The guy throwing away his laptop – this means to me the “speed of throwing laptop away”. Actually this is precisely my case a month ago.. (the rest is here)

Design Fail Weekend

Pepsi's branding issues

I don’t care if regular “Pepsi” now branded as “Diet Coca” or even “Clorox” as long the price is “as advertised”. I do not like surprises at the register like “Oops! Your Pepsi is $8.99; $7.99 is the price for Diet Coke”.

This toy could be useful for some dads with some special fantasies:

Some dads could play with it too

Not too much fail here, however I found the toy’s positioning amusing:

Nice positioning

Obvious “design fail” on gene level. Instead of driving one more block and make a safe right turn, the guy (or girl?) prefers to do this:

Design Fail on gene level

And finally, this weekend my favorite: portable HDD drive. I am the potential customer (I am taking lots of digital photos, videos, I have huge legal music archive, I am doing tons of coding and graphics), so I could speak out.

Espresso coffee maker or HDD?

So here it is: marketing idea sucks big times. It is dumb to position pretty much technical devices (HDD drive, flash memory and similar) as an everyday consumer gadget (like MP3 player, portable game console or so). The dancing in extase, iPod-plugged human silhouette works perfectly fine to advertise Apple’s mp3 players. But I cannot imagine the same silhouette dancing with HDD drive in it’s hand.
What’s really important to me, if I be shopping for external HDD right now, are it’s capacity, type (IDE, SATA, SCSI), shock resistance, if it supports FireWare as well as USB2, and if it not comes with another stupid USB cord. I really do not care about it’s color: I am not going to carry HDD on the neck strap (or pants belt) on a full-time.
When I see the box from a few feet distance for a couple of seconds (there are thousands of other goods in the store, I cannot read every box’s micro text), the composition of “Espresso” word and a coffee bean leaves me the impression that this is some kind of USB-powered coffee maker. Actually, this coffee bean and a box togeather look like a car seat. In this case model name “Espresso” makes sense: color is important in advertising car seats cover.

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