Here’s another one, and it is again from Walmart. I do shop other places, but Walmart seems to have the most agregious examples (or the ones worth photographing, anyway).

The poor girl on this Faded Glory poster has dark circles under her eyes, dark enough to look like fading bruises from a black eye. It would gave taken a graphic designer a few minutes to ease or erase them. Instead, they’ve let this tired face fill a 4-foot tall display.

It probably would have helped if she looked happy, too.

Shelves of portable hard drives.

But Walmart’s branding has failed. The Walmart “splat” logo icon is near the top of the display, and I think they’re relying on the icon alone to reinforce the Walmart brand.

Here’s why: Instead of using one of the stock phrases about savings (or even better, a custom phrase about technology savings) their designers decided to use this advertising for a line about taxes.

Huh? What do these hard drives have to do with taxes? Nothing. I even looked more closely to see if there was some kind package deal — buy a hard drive, get free tax software, or something like that. Nothing. Nada.

So instead of reinforcing the savings brand image, Walmart is confusing people.

(If Western Digital has seen this, they probably aren’t too happy either. I hope.)

The “throwback” carton really popped out at me, and it occurred to me that the current Pepsi colors are kind of dark. It’s not a lack of white, although I think that’s what made the old design pop out. It’s just that the colors, like the blue on the regular Pepsi, are dark and are not really offset by other hues.

I snapped pics with my phone to show the contrast.

That second pic also shows the Pepsi branding previous to the current warped version. They’re very flashy, but still better than the corporate navy and warped logo. Blech. Pepsi should never have messed with the wave. (They should have learned from Coca-Cola that you don’t mess with the original!)

Edit: The “throwback” carton is really kind of fun. Which makes me realize that the new branding is not! Since when is soda pop serious?

One did stand out to me, and I hadn’t seen it before:

Now there’s a graphic designer that takes their field seriously.

via Quick Sprout