BREATHTAKING: Pepsi Design Strategy (Arnell Group, 2008)
Twenty-seven pages arguing that a soft drink logo follows from the golden ratio, the Parthenon, the Earth's magnetic field, the expansion of the universe, and a diagram in which the new logo exerts a gravitational pull on shoppers walking down an aisle. Pepsi reportedly paid the Arnell Group a million dollars for the identity. The document leaked in February 2009 and has been passed around design studios ever since.
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Pepsi commissioned the Arnell Group to redesign its identity and received twenty-seven pages of this. The argument runs from the golden ratio through the Parthenon to the magnetic field of the Earth, and arrives at a diagram in which the logo exerts a measurable force on shoppers:
Establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a "transactional" experience to an "invitational" expression.
Later pages propose that the brand expands as the universe does, labelling the concentric diagrams Pepsi Planet, Pepsi Orbits and Pepsi Galaxy. One page sets out the Pepsi Energy Fields and their symmetry.
It leaked in February 2009 and design studios have circulated it ever since as evidence of what a very large fee buys. The document does something else as well, which is to write down a register usually only spoken: the house style in which a decision about the proportions of a circle gets defended by borrowing the vocabulary of physics. Every studio has made that argument out loud. This one typeset it.
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