Chiquita Banana Brand Refresh

An Interview with the Designer, DJ Neff

by matt sung|February 04, 2010

Chiquita's latest ad campaign imbues its audience with an instant sense of wonder. Using playful illustrations on stickers juxtaposed to the iconic Chiquita stickers, the product and brand become more engaging to the consumer—plus they just look cool. We got a chance to ask the Art Director, DJ Neff, some questions about the process of making bananas (even more) fun.

Updated: 2/16/10

What can you tell us about creating this new campaign for Chiquita?

The process relied heavily in spending as much time with the product as possible. In this case it meant my partner Mark Krajan and I eating a bunch of bananas a day. Thankfully, we like bananas.It helps to immerse ourselves in the product and research as much as we can before coming up with ideas. In this case that emphasis was on the fruit and its cultural significance. After filling up on information, we let it all spill out in different ideas, drawings, sayings, photographs, then start to figure out truths. These truths all stem from the product and work outward, pulling from research and ideas to build upon the foundation, laddering up to a big idea.

The cornerstone of the campaign relied on the little blue stickers, the biggest icon for the brand, and the biggest way to get the word out. It was obvious the character stickers were going to be a must do, but we pushed to create more, something fun for people to do, a hub for Chiquita fans to go to. Further thinking led us to giving bananas personalities and how all bananas start out good but eventually go bad (and for consumers not to let that happen). "Dont Let Another Good Banana Go Bad" was the through line of our campaign and it was incorporated into all of our work. The idea grew into a fully immersive microsite that contained viral videos, a sticker generator, and a completely unique 3D flash game called Banana Boogie Battle. This experience gave the users opportunities to create their own banana sticker personality and breakdance battle against bananas that have turned to the dark side.

Above: eatachiquita.com

What were your client's goals, and how did this project help communicate them?

The client’s goals were kind of like that dream brief you get handed that simply says: “Make bananas cool.” At first it’s like, “Whoa that’s easy,” but many times the more open the brief, the more you have to do to check yourself creatively. It can be easy to get caught up in a landslide of slick executions or fad creative wrappers. These kinds of approaches often do little for the campaign’s longevity or brand image in the future. Our client expects us to come to them with the coolest and most innovative stuff, but it was still up to us to really figure out strategically what about Chiquita bananas would always be cool. Determining what was cool fell into a few different areas: creativity, expression, and entertainment.

We created a range of ideas that we felt kept true to the Chiquita brand equities and allowed consumers to interact with the brand in new cool and exciting ways.  In partnering with The Famous Group in Los Angeles, we were able to execute all of our ideas in the same facility, from shooting videos, editing, 3D modeling, and designing the website itself. We weren't creating just a campaign, we were creating a multi-faceted, interactive brand experience from the ground up.  Also, knowing the client would want to track results in real time, we felt integrating with Facebook gave us a lot of advantages in exposure and instant communication between the brand and its enthusiasts.

These illustrations are really great and fun. What inspired you to create this family of characters?

Inspiration for the face idea first came from seeing what people did with the chiquita stickers after they ate the banana even before we put faces on them. So, the hope was by creating the characters, now when they eat the banana, they are even more excited and inspired to put that sticker somewhere special to keep it. The designs themselves had to be fun, so I just thought about all the fun things I like, cartoons, toys, people I know, and they sort of just came out. Honestly, we did so many stickers the hardest part was picking only 25.

How did your interactions with the client evolve? Did they give you guys creative
freedom from the get go, or was it something that took more effort to express your own vision?

Our interactions with the client were fairly typical, but fortunately the client was hungry to do something different. Surprisingly working with bananas isn’t the bowl of laughs most think it should be. Being a commodity, it’s a pretty straight business. It’s hard to sway consumers when purchases are made primarily based on price. Luckily, Chiquita had already made efforts to “cool” up the stickers in the past—nothing like we had imagined, but it helped pave the way for our ideas for sure. Once we showed them the direction, they were excited about the possibilities, but pushed us to create a campaign that would have longevity. We were given a lot of freedom to design and create it the way we imagined it, but we liked involving their input as much as we could. It’s really important to maintain an open communication channel about our goals as designers while trying to integrate the clients needs and educating them on solutions we felt could work. A lot of the time you have to not only be creative with the campaign, but also be creative with the way you talk about it, coming up with ideas sometimes on the spot to help keep your client interested and excited. All in all it was a great experience and I am thankful we had clients like we did. It showed in the work.

So, what is “brand equity”, and what makes it significant not only for Chiquita but also for other brands out there?

I like to talk about brand equity in what I do because I feel like it is the most important starting point to rebranding any business. I think brand equity is a pretty simple notion: unique value. Sometimes it’s an easy to see value, like the Chiquita stickers, or sometimes it can be harder to recognize, like an old forgotten tagline that was abandoned because of changing fads. This is where my job gets fun, in discovering unique traits a brand has to build on, even if they may be lost in the marketing shuffle over the years.

The great thing about looking hard at something the brand already owns, no matter how small, is that there is usually a cultural recognition there already. With some application of this value to an idea you have, it creates a familiar association with an unfamiliar dynamic, therefore creating intrigue in the viewer—much like pop art does. In the case of Chiquita, we felt that there was a lot of brand equity in the stickers, both with product interaction and marketing potential. Creating a campaign to really maximize its potential creatively was a smart decision and gave added value to an already established brand equity.

Sometimes brand equity is created and not found, like with a product that is new or unprecedented. In this case brand equity can exist within brands surrounding the product in the cultural landscape. Similar values with other companies, many times from different categories, can lend themselves to a new product because of a familiar association or cultural significance. Then our job as designers becomes recognizing the area that our product lives in, or wants to live in, and creating value to allow its seamless placement amongst its peers. Like if you’re going to a black tie affair you don’t wear a Hawaiian shirt, you wear a tuxedo or formal dress. So when designing a brand for your product, make sure you know what party you are going to go to because what you wear speaks wonders about who you are.

Many times as designers we are tasked to help brands build or rebuild their identities. We may initially think that a clean slate is required to achieve a better identity, and in some cases that can be true if the existing brand identity has little to no value. But in most cases, there is always something that can be built on, discovered, or championed with any brand. It really just requires spending as much time as you can with the product, immersing yourself in it. Like method designing, you just have to live it and the work will flow through you.

Any other shout outs?

Definitely, I just want thank everyone who was a part of this project, I was proud to be part of a great team.  Big thanks to The Famous Group in Los Angeles for their great production work, and to Chiquita for allowing us to hopefully move them a couple notches closer to “cool”. And thank you Matt for giving me an opportunity to talk about a part of what I love to do, I really appreciate everything design:related is doing and it’s great to be a part of such an amazing project.

Above: skateboard graphics

Video: From Social Graphs to Interest Graphs

• August 27, 2010
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In the next installment of discussions exploring the state and future of social media, Chris Beck, founder of 26dottwo (@26dottwo) and I review how relationships online are evolving from social networks to social “nicheworks” or contextual networks.

In social media, how we connect with one another reflects our interests as well as our contacts. We’re adapting our definition of relationships to now also include a new, thinner layer of “relations” in order to refine our online experience as well as how we learn, discover, and share. In doing so, we create a social silhouette that outlines our interests, concerns, views, and potential,which ultimately is reflected in how we architect and cultivate our social graph. Over time we transform social graphs into interest graphs. For those brands, organizations, and individuals looking to associate with relevant groups, having one recipe or formula is no longer effective to suit the tastes of these disparate, yet influential nicheworks.

If businesses or anyone for that matter have any hope of earning prominence within these important communities, relevance and engagement become paramount. The art and science of all we do from here on out will determine our stature within each network and more importantly, the resonance and endurance of what we introduce into social streams.

Information knows no boundaries, but attention and relevance become the barriers to pervasiveness. How will you revise your engagement and content strategies to stimulate resonance?

#R.R.S.

Anonymous asked: What advice would you give to a graphic design student?

Design does not equal client work.

It’s hard to make purple work in a design. The things your teachers tell you in class are not gospel. You will get conflicting information. It means that both are wrong. Or both are true. This never stops. Most decisions are gray, and everything lives on a spectrum of correctness and suitability.

Look people in the eyes when you are talking or listening to them. The best teachers are the ones who treat their classrooms like a workplace, and the worst ones are the ones who treat their classroom like a classroom as we’ve come to expect it. Eat breakfast. Realize that you are learning a trade, so craft matters more than most say. Realize that design is also a liberal art. Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling. Libraries are a good place. The books are free there, and it smells great.

If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.

The best communicators are gift-givers.

Don’t become dependent on having other people pull it out of you while you’re in school. If you do, you’re hosed once you graduate. Keep two books on your nightstand at all times: one fiction, one non-fiction.

Buy lightly used. Patina is a pretty word, and a beautiful concept.

Develop a point of view. Think about what experiences you have that many others do not. Then, think of what experiences you have that almost everyone else has. Then, mix those two things and try to make someone cry or laugh or feel understood.

Design doesn’t have to sell. Although, that’s usually its job.

Think of every project as an opportunity to learn, but also an opportunity to teach. Univers is a great typeface and white usually works and grids are nice and usually necessary, but they’re not a style. Helvetica is nice too, but it won’t turn water to wine.

Take things away until you cry. Accept most things, and reject most of your initial ideas. Print it out, chop it up, put it back together. When you’re aimlessly pushing things around on a computer screen, print it out and push it around in real space. Change contexts when you’re stuck. Draw wrong-handed and upside down and backwards. Find a good seat outside.

Design is just a language, it’s not a message. If you say “retro” too much you will get hives and maybe die. Learn your design history. Know that design changes when technology changes, and its been that way since the 1400s. Adobe software never stops being frustrating. Learn to write, and not school-style writing. A text editor is a perfectly viable design tool. Graphic design has just as much to do with words as it does with pictures, and a lot of my favorite designers come to design from the world of words instead of the world of pictures.

If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to them for dear life. Sympathy is medicine.

Scissors are good, music is better, and mixed drinks with friends are best. Start brave and brash: you can always make things more conservative, but it’s hard to make things more radical. Edit yourself, but let someone else censor you. When you ride the bus, imagine that you are looking at everything from the point of view of someone else on the ride. If you walk, look up on the way there and down on the way back. Aesthetics are fleeting, the only things with longevity are ideas. Read Bringhurst and one of those novels they made you read in high school cover to cover every few years. (Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby.)

Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling.

Most important things happen at a table. Food, friends, discussion, ideas, work, peace talks, and war plans. It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now and then: it gives you hope.

Everything is interesting to someone. That thing that you think is bad is probably just not for you. Be wary of minimalism as an aesthetic decision without cause. Simple is almost a dirty word now. Almost. Tools don’t matter very much, all you need is a sharp knife, but everyone has their own mise en place. If you need an analogy, use an animal. If you see a ladder in a piece of design or illustration, it means the deadline was short. Red, white, black, and gray always go together. Negative space. Size contrast. Directional contrast. Compositional foundations.

Success is generating an emotion. Failure is a million different things. Second-person writing is usually heavy-handed, like all of this.

Seeking advice is addicting and can become a proxy for action. Giving it can also be addicting in a potentially pretentious, soul-rotting sort of way, and can replace experimenting because you think you know how things work. Be suspicious of lists, advice, and lists of advice.

Everyone is just making it up as they go along.

This about sums up everything I know.

Mad Men Font Fail… or was it?

Posted on July 26, 2010 by evan7257| 23 Comments

Tonight was the first episode of the fourth season of Mad Men. It was a bittersweet moment, in which we once again can revel in the mid-century modern adventures of the anti-hero Don Draper, but also mourn the approaching summer’s end.

One of the many enjoyable parts of the Mad Men viewing experience (besides laughing at the characters’ ignorance of upcoming historical events. Fools! Johnson was planning on sending more troops to Vietnam the whole time! And you will have Nixon to kick around anymore!) is watching in awe how the show flawlessly recreates the ’60s style down to pinpoint accuracy. Sure there are a few mistakes, but overall it is very impressive and does a better job at truly immersing the audience than almost any other show.

This is why typeface purists were shocked, shocked, to see the logo for the new Sterling Cooper Draper Price.

Behold! The high quality of taking a picture of a paused DVRd show with my iPhone.

Instantly, Twitter was a twitter with shock and disgust.

Is that…

Can it be…

Arial?!

For those who do not know, Arial is one the typefaces, behind comic sans and papyrus, most likely to get you in trouble with a font nerd. What makes it so repugnant is its obvious ripoff from, yet inferiority to, Helvetica (a typeface so wonderful it merits its own documentary). What is worse is that Arial was created by Microsoft as a stand-in for Helvetica simply so it would not have to pay for the superior original. Therefore, the ubiquity of the Microsoft software has ensured that Arial is used more often as a generic sans-serif than that pinnacle of the modern sans-serif that is Helvetica.

But certainly Mad Men’s art directors would know this, right? They wouldn’t use such an obvious Arial anachronism? So perhaps there are a few arguments that can save Mad Men from such a damning mistake in its first episode back.

1. It is not any typeface.

The logo isn’t on paper. It is not typed. It is not pre-fab lettering. It seems to be a stand-alone, one-time creation for the new company of Sterling Cooper Draper Price. Perhaps the craftsman who created it merely made up his own lettering and went from there, rather than adhering to an established font as a guide.

This would explain the similarity to Arial. The artist looked at whatever sans-serif he had around to get a sense of design and then just kind of deviated from the standard shape.

2. It is Akzidenz Grotesk

I took the super-duper high quality camera-phone picture of a paused TV show and tried putting into What The Font. However, the website had a problem with the shape, contrast, etc. So I fumbled around with the SCDP logo and came up with this:

If you turn up the contrast really high and make it black and white, its modern art!

When I put this into What The Font, its top answer seemed awfully close: Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk.

Akizdenz-Grotesk would actually be a great typeface for the Mad Men art directors to have used. According to Wikipedia, it was created in 1898 and was the first sans-serif typeface to be widely used, and it ended up influencing many later neo-grotesk typefaces. Neo-grotesk typefaces like Neue Haas Grotesk, or as it was renamed in 1960: Helvetica.

So lets compare Akzidenz-Grotesk to Arial.

Akzidenz!

Arial!

The height of the C in Arial in comparison to Akidenz seems to be the most obvious difference, but is it notable enough to prove that the Sterling Cooper Draper Price slogan is not in Arial?

I have enough faith in the Mad Men art directors to believe that they would have gone with not the FAIL of Arial, and not the obvious choice of Helvetia, but instead would have chosen something old and classic for the ’60s. Lest we forget, Helvetica was just released in 1960, only a few years before tonight’s episode. Furthermore, one can imagine that it would be slightly difficult to get large metal letters in the shape of newly released typefaces. One would have to get letters in something that had been around for a while. Something that factories had been putting out for a while, making in bulk. Something like Akzidenz Grotesk.

Mad Men art directors, I will never doubt you again.

highverbalfan

It was only a matter of time before Inception-inspired LEGO scenes were created. Luckily for all of us, Flickr users Ochre Jelly and Profound Whatever did not disappoint…

More pics at My Modern Metropolis.