OUR FRIEND RICK SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN...:

Dems' dismal, detached design: I thought Team Obama knew branding (Rick Perlstein, September 24th 2010, NY Daily News)

It looks like the insignia you'd expect to see on the side of a Danish police boat. Or the letter in the alphabet that comes after ©.

Or the logo for a service station chain where you can microwave a burrito or grab a giant bag of beef jerky any day of the year. Or a near-failing grade stamped by the FDA on a piece of chuck roast.

Or a "big 'D' for Dopey, Disappointing, Dismal, Discontinued, Disjointed, Dilapidated, Disintegrated, Destroyed, Damned, Depressing."

So say my Facebook friends about the new logo of the Democratic Party. [...]

Remember that glorious day on the Mall in January? The new Pepsi cans were everywhere, its new logo ripping off the red, white and blue "O" sunrise glyph. For the next year, it seemed like everything coming out of a design shop mimicked the graceful font of an Obama campaign sign.

Now this. Deflated, dyspeptic. One more false dawn, promised, then snatched away. Obama used to be big. Maybe he can be so again. Maybe it's just the branding that got small. Let's hope.

...that the main takeaway from that January day was that, no matter the logo, the actual speech was a disaster--maybe the only widely criticized Inaugural Address of our lifetimes. It's not the brand that's the problem but the essential emptiness it represents.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 25, 2010 6:10 PM