I'm going to bemoan a well-known, yet half-witted deception in our glamor profession. It's always fished out of some ol' art directors "bag o' tricks" when their feeble minds have really lost touch with today's changing audience. The trick -- which I reckon you guessed from the title -- is the placement of sunglasses on a tired or new brand in order to make it seem (to regurgitate the antiquated slang slung around creative meetings that produce this drivel) "hipster" and "with it". Recently, I've witnessed sunglasses added to my beloved Pepperidge Farm Goldfish^®, who's crack advertising group has ridiculously renamed Finny on the "Xplosive Pizza" flavor (note: changing "ex" to "x" for added "zip" is another mark of idiocy in the field, but we'll bait n' tackle that another time). It's clear that sunglasses are being used as pawns in audacious attempts to revive old weathered brands -- from The Muppets, adding a little "edge" to their otherwise dismal puppet lives, to giving a little "kick" to Fruity Pebbles by adding shaded eye-googler covers to aged toons Fred and Barney, turning them into a couple of "cool cats", right? Wrong!

In this age of obviously poor judgement from rock stars and politicians alike, do we creatives really have to follow suit with this hocus pocus? Isn't there anything else that can be used to revive a tired brand or enliven a new one? Every time you see a Ray-Ban donning cheetah hocking cheese snacks at the local grocery store, I advise you to punch it squarely in the snout on principle alone. How far from the tree of greatness has the mighty graphic designer fallen to continually unleash this tired cliche on a clearly "suspecting" audience?

What is it that makes sunglasses look cool? It wasn't Corey Hart. According to Wikipedia, the global source for highly accurate (suspect) and 99.999% truthful (mis)information, sunglasses have "been associated with celebrities and film actors primarily due to the desire to mask identity, but in part due to the lighting involved in production being typically stronger than natural light and uncomfortable to the naked eye."

So, then one must assume, what insolent designers are attempting to accomplish by adding sunglasses to cartoon rodents, rabbits and bears, is to ultimately brainwash unsuspecting children into thinking that these beasts are celebrities? I've got a news-flash for you -- kids aren't stupid anymore, and aren't buying that these bloodthirsty creatures are celebrities. It didn't work in the long run for "Salisbury's Camel", and it's not working for anyone else. Mike Salisbury either created or abused the stupidest cliche in our biz by not only creating a phallic-faced, smiling creature that kids would be attracted to like rats to a pipe(r) -- but to add insult to injury, he also slapped sunglasses on it! That statement alone demands that he be ousted from any Art Director's Club immediately with surfboard and smokes firmly in hand.

I've also been privy to this nonsense first-hand. Back in 1991, as an intern for a long defunct advertising agency in Buffalo, New York, I witnessed a rotund (and usually hung over), art director adding sunglasses to the mascot of a local amusement park for a series of billboards welcoming 2 months of summer to the region before our 10 months of miserable Arctic temperatures that could only be compared to the chill of being dropped at at the midpoint between earth and the moon in a wet bathing suit. Thankfully, his aesthetic rubbed me the wrong way -- not only because he was applying sunglasses to the mascot, but because the mascot for the amusement park was indeed, a smirking sun!

If you're a designer, I implore that before you apply a pair of sunglasses to your cute little snail mascot you've whipped up for your next project, rationalize that the problem with the design might not be the fact that you're appealing to an audience by anthropomorphizing a slimy garden pest in protective eyewear -- it's possible that you've begun to run out of ideas. With God as my witness, last Tuesday I saw sunglasses on Barney^® the dinosaur...

It's like slathering Rite-Guard^® on a dead skunk.

Dave Fletcher is a Founder and Creative Director of theMechanism, a maxi-media firm in New York City and London. While he's been known to wear a pair of orange-tinted sunglasses to block out the rays of Mr. Sun, he insists that he is neither a tired brand or anthropomorphized bird or beer can, so it's ok.