Designer Brand Puns

GooCheese

Guess I'm Lacoste intolerant...

Hebrews

When I worked for a design agency, I had two adamant higher-ups. There was a brand identity project for a new company, and I was in charge of typography, but those two disagreed with my choice of font.

The first one was this stony-looking Peruvian-American man named Esteban Ferrero, but since that's Spanish for Steven Smith, and our company had a rule that everyone has to call each other using nicknames instead of last names, everyone, including himself, just called him Steve. The second one was a Dutch woman with a sharp glare named Evelien van der Berg. She was famous for giving designers a hard time convincing her that their design choices work better than hers. In accordance with the company rules, we called her Eve.

Anyway, I showed Steve my first draft, and he wasn't convinced that I chose LinoLetter as the main font, and told me that I should use a sans-serif font. But I stood by my position that serifs add legibility to printed and digital material, that it fits the company's identity as an organic store, and that it is hard to stand out with a sans-serif. It took a lot of debate, but in the end, Steve was convinced that LinoLetter was acceptable.

A few days later, I showed Eve a more elaborated version, as for the sizes and styles of the font, and the pairing of LinoLetter with Century as the headline font. She insisted that I should have used a sans-serif font for the headline. I expressed my view that LinoLetter is a font with composed and legible shape, and Century, while it is also legible, has flair at larger sizes. She kept disagreeing with me, saying I should use something bolder and more contrasting, like Tungsten. It felt like hours had passed before the conversation went anywhere, so I had to give up and look for a sans-serif font that goes with LinoLetter.

So it goes to show that the one who gave me a hard time was adamant Eve, not adamant Steve.

I'm not usually one for bars, but since the smoking ban in Illinois, they're not so bad. I'm not much of a drinker either, but this one place in particular offers free soft drinks for designated drivers of groups of three or more. You have to get them from a location separate from the bartender. You declare yourself upon entering the place, then your hand is marked, and from that point, you're not allowed alcohol, but you get the free soft drinks.

Their specialty is their own brand of a mixed fruit drink that's really good. It's popular enough that you're usually standing behind six or seven people to wait your turn. So, Saturday night, while I'm waiting for mine, this cute blonde walks up behind me. I figured I'd try to be witty and asked her, "Can I buy you a drink?"

She scowled at me with, "Well aren't you the funny one?"

"What's with the attitude?" I asked her.

"Sorry," she said. "It's them." And she thumbed toward a table with (would you believe it?) a brunette and a redhead.

"Why?" I asked. "What'd they do?"

"I'm just getting sick of it," she said. "Every time we come here, it's always me in the punch line."