December 15, 2006 - Comments Off on Caution: Can Contains Stupid

Caution: Can Contains Stupid

Arizona Energy Drink canAbout 5 years ago, I spoke at the HOW Design Conference in Orlando on the topic of "Good Examples of Bad Design." It was a gratifying experience to be speaking at the same conference that in it's history featured such luminaries as Glaser, Carson and Mok, and from the reaction of the crowd, my endless chattering onstage about lousy design clocking in at somewhere around 50 minutes, was well-received. So, apparently I'm an "expert" at sniffing this kind of stuff out.

I occasionally indulge in energy drinks -- usually as a nectareous reward for my jaunty morning runs around Prospect Park in Brooklyn -- and my racing heart and instant case of the jitters on the subway is hardly a pleasing after-effect of my eager slurpage of this caffeinated nectar of the hyperactive gods. I passionately search for alternatives to Red Bull because if they still can't manage to pull their package branding together with their cartoonish television ads, I refuse to support them. It's my "creative civic duty", or so I've convinced myself anyway...

This morning, as I was browsing the available energy gulps behind the frosty glass at the bodega -- skimming past several fiendish looking, yet interestingly designed cans of mighty "Crunk Energy Drink" -- my eye-googlers spied one of the most undesirable energy drink can designs I've seen.

This performance potion, disguised to be what resembles a health elixir and a death tonic at the same time, intrigued me enough to buy it simply so I could have a rant.

Now, why some nice tea company would try to make their performance drink look like capital punishment in a can by featuring the word "Caution" in the most visible section above the logo is a shock -- but I'm sure that there were several marketing geniuses who fought the owners of Arizona drinks -- eventually getting their way, in a vicious battle to preserve "creative irony."

You can decree that it worked -- that it intrigued and seduced me to purchase it -- but I'd say the reasons for my cash acquisition hinged somewhere between terror, amusement and simply doing my civic duty to keep a drink, openly disguised as a poison, out of the hands of some maniac high school kid looking for a morning rush. The hearty fluid inside the "Caution Can" met its untimely demise by way of the sewer drain on the corner of Fulton and Clinton Ave -- to likely mutate and fuel a generation of super rats to wreak unholy havoc on the city sometime before the shopping season is mercifully over and the real nasty snow begins to fall -- slathering Brooklyn with a coat of fresh slush and preventing me from taking my morning park runs until the global warming-induced thaw, sometime in July.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. He finished two cans of blissful Crunk Energy Drink in preparation for this rant and has been repeatedly clutching at his heart like Fred Sanford since the second paragraph.

Published by: davefletcher in The Design Mechanism

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