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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Unobvious catalog system fail.

San Jose city library has a huge collection of foreign language books. Clearly they can’t just drop them on the shelves randomly, books must be arranged in alphabetical order by the author’s name. But there’s a problem: many foreign languages are written in non-English letters, and some aren’t even using letters at all…

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