The fact that it is a sales gimick—admittedly an extremely clever one—is not at all surprising.
I think it’s sad that instead of respecting sex as a private expression of love, it is thrown in our faces on logos to sell us stuff.
I am an old guy, and so you may dismiss this as the grumblings of a old man. But the reality is that the public space—advertising, entertainment, politics—is full of anger and sexual provocation devoid of love, and it once was not—at least not on anywhere near such a scale.
I just saw the movie ’Idiocracy’, which captures the coarseness of the contemporary life with such accuracy that it is depressing rather than funny. Of course this logo is brilliant compared to most in the same vein. But it is still cut from the same cloth.
I think it’s sad that instead of respecting sex as a private expression of love, it is thrown in our faces on logos to sell us stuff.
Interesting — I saw the mug as a great piece of art, not as something rather tawdry. Sigmund would find it compelling that you seem to see “sex, sex, sex” everywhere, Bill.
What’s really odd is that I was drawn to the site originally to check out a book entitled BILL BERKSON’S
SUDDEN ADDRESS: SELECTED LECTURES 1981-2006....
>you seem to see “sex, sex, sex” everywhere, Bill.
I don’t think I’m more sex obsessed than the average guy—which is to say, normal insanity :)
What the designer wants me to do is to puzzle out the graphic so instead of seeing a letter A and two circles I see a couple engaged in sex. The hidden/blatant thing is its cleverness.
Don’t tell me you posted it without seeing it? That would be delightful :) The web site spells it out for you, just in case.
The ’other Bill Berkson’ is I believe a distant cousin, though I haven’t met him.
Don’t tell me you posted it without seeing it? That would be delightful :) The web site spells it out for you, just in case.
Um, well, I saw the title of the page and the colour, and that was about it. That’ll teach me to spend my morning squiting at html and css, and my afternoon working on a very delicate piece of art. When you can’t focus more than 6” in front of your face, looking at anything else other than recognizable letters is, at best, problematic.
The ‘other Bill Berkson’ is I believe a distant cousin, though I haven’t met him.
I’m afraid I didn’t see it until I saw it in the wikipedia link, I was thinking of a thread that Nick Shinn started about the position of umlauts. Agree about the sales gimmick thing, fortunately their style is not totally obsessed by sex http://www.astyle.it//A-Style//Motomondiale//Foto%20Assen//Girls//003.ht...
honestly, why do they only sponsor the Assen round of MotoGP?
I saw this earlier today and I thought, “What’s the big deal”- just a capital A and a diaeresis tilted off to the side in a not so special slab. But now I ’get it’ and its not cool. I agree with William. Sex is tossed around too much as a trivial thing- it should be treated tenderly and sacredly.
I guess this is harder to see than I thought. That makes it even more clever, as people will learn more by a whisper campaign, than by seeing it at first. However, once seen the coarseness is there.
I guess because of the title ’letters have feelings too’ I knew there must be more than meets the eye at first, so I puzzled over it and after half a minute I saw it. Maybe drawing type all day also helps me see stuff—I hope so!
>a likely story
Because the other Bill Berkson, the poet, is a little older and published first, I’ve always used ’William’ as an author.
advertising etc. is so full of sleazy jokes, that it’s just enervating and stale, and i, for one, neither want to be annoyed nor bored by sex. it should always be something special.
but…
i still think this is funny, i can’t help myself. admittedly it’s dubious as a logo. which of course makes it a bad logo. hmm… now i’m confused…
Took me a while and only after reading the whole thread could I make the two dots turn into little decapitated heads.... sure it’s not my innocence, either. ;)
Disappointing. No civilized coffee drinker should use this cup. Not because of the image, but because of its shape: the proportions are wrong, and the edge not well defined.
“At this time [from 1991!] there was no income as A-style was just a Logo, nothing more. Some T-Shirts were printed and sold in a friend’s shop in the centre of Milan. Two years ago Marco was presented to Massimo, a real gentleman that worked in the clothing business, who saw the real potential of this Logo in the “Streetwear” clothing market. There are now 2 factories that make only A-Style products. Marketing is still done in exactly the same way, Gorilla, Abusive, or call it what you like but very effective and a HUGE success.”
I’ve tried to write this several times now. Let’s just say I am being a devil’s advocate, for the sake of good conversation.
I can’t say I really mind the exploitation of libido in advertising. It makes sense. I think the feeble teasing of ’FCUK’ was fairly lame compared to this, which has some subtlety, but that is irrelevant to the fact that either is a graphic innuendo.
Although it probably sounds terribly new-fangled, a lot of people (mine, younger and older generations) I’ve grown up with enjoyed a variety of sexual activity, and some have found intimacy and meaningful relationships within and without that arena. Sex is a healthily rewarding expression of genetic drive. Love is about respect, trust, patience and some of our other higher traits.
Cuisine is a less dangerous sibling, because people don’t “carry the bloodline” with a perfectly-prepared lobster.
In marketing, one’s desire to be rewarded and recognized for effort, to belong to a community and feel wanted, and to feel secure are constantly promised. That is because it is what we want and if we think the product will give that, we’ll pay for it.
The funny thing is, all of these things these things you receive from those who love you. A lot of those people you never picked, but were handed by genetics, circumstance, etc. But there is one who loves you that you pick. Your mate. Partner/spouse/lover etc. Probably, the one you most commonly procreate with.
Sex is demoted to a symbol of love, instead of being recognized as its own weird thing. And thus, it becomes not a cheap and tawdry thing that is largely harmless, especially with modern technology and hygiene. It becomes a poor symbol of something great, complicated and inherently hard to sell. Marketers would be suicidal not to value sex so greatly.
Choz, the view you express, one variety of ’sexual modernism’, has been around for approximately a century, and advocates the separation of love, sex and marriage. You can read the history of it in this book.
The advocates of sexual modernism have typically regard those who disagree with them as backward, stuck in outdated views of the pre-contraception era.
However, in my view, and the view of many others, now the situation is reversed. Sexual modernism has proven to be a huge failure over the past century, both in theory and in practice, and its current advocates are ignoring the lessons of the past century, and particularly the last 50 years. Just to cite one fact, married people report more satisfying sex lives than unmarried.
If you are interested, there is now a big literature out there on these issues, with a huge amount of academic research. Good internet sites, should you be interested, are the Center for Marriage and Family, the National Marriage Project, a research center, and SmartMarriages.com.
Some might find Your link to the Center for Marriage and Family at the Institute for American Values contains material that is far more offending than a doggy style A.
Fredo, I don’t think you can avoid offending those who are offended simply by views differing from their own.
I think the debate about the relations of love, sex, and marriage is an important debate, wherever you stand on it. Those who want to avoid it and the associated research in my opinion do so at their own peril.
Incidentally, sexual modernists themselves would be split on the A-style logo. As the history book I linked to explains, there is a split between romantic modernists and ’pleasure ethic’ modernists. The romantic modernists want to keep love and sex together, but split those off from marriage. Pleasure ethic modernists, like Kinsey, are in favor of separating love and sex, regarding the pleasure from sex as being a higher priority. The romantic modernists would not like the logo, and the pleasure ethic ones would.
In my own view, both traditional, pre-1900 views and sexual modernism are passé and destined to the dustbin of history.
p.s. You might be interested in the recent study of marriage and family in Scandinavia. I find it refreshingly objective and very interesting.
I hope no on is so offended that they have a serious problem with wither William or I speaking on this subject. This is interesting, and design is nothing without exploring the society in which it speaks. If you do, however, please do not marry either of us. :)
I personally do not think so much of “Relationship/Sexual Modernism” that it is a valid solution to all weaknesses of prior models. Postmodernism has evolved because I am not the only one who thinks this way. Futura and OCR-A did not make serif faces obsolete, to draw a parallel. Today’s myriad of divergent faces is how thew world wants it.
The point I was suggesting above is that Sexual Romanticism, as well as Moral Romanticism, has had much more of an impact on the power of sex in advertising than Sexual Modernism has, by overemphasizing the bond of sex and love. Due to the sanctioning of marriage by other major institutions in the classical form, 19th century views have persisted alongside modern ones. Marketing exploits the weaknesses in the romantic model because they work, and they only work at that level we have permitted.
My prediction is that you will slowly see a new type of “postmodern” ethical distinction. An atomization of the facets that make up social living into tiny shards, that exist solely with the intention to be reassembled. This is a geeky example, but perhaps you might think of it as each person is a microkernel, with access to a million moral-memes to access and build into their identity. Each is developed discretely. Then one’s life would be the runtime compilation. This would mean the untangling of marriage, love AND sex from each other, then being refined and reintegrated. I am not saying I endorse this, just that it would mimic our behavior socially in other fields.
It may appear, one hundred years from now, that our use of sex to sell hemmeroid cremes, pickup trucks and lumber are nonsensical and quanint. I think it will likely take longer, due to biological issues, but I still currently hold Romanticism at fault more than the Modernist distinctions, for the power of sex in advertising.
Marketing relies on tabulations of data that shows they sold more Budlight than before when the have commercials with barely clad babes in them. They don’t even look at the philisophical differences of Modernism vs Romanticism. Marketing folks are all about money. T&A sells beer and cars. Romantic stuff sells greeting cards and engagement rings. This is not a philosophically based notion.
The A-style marketers deliberately used a ’guerilla’ marketing approach as they thought it would sell to the group who would buy their stuff. They are young people who like think of themselves as ’rebels’ and ’advanced’. So they plastered it all over the streets. The marketers probably don’t give a damn whether the people they are successfully selling to are deluded fools or leaders into a better future. So long as they buy, they’re happy.
So I think Chris has it about right as far as marketing: marketers just do whatever they think will work for their target population. However, I do think they look at the philosophy of their target polulation: some marketing targets those with traditional views, some with romantic views, some with ’pleasure ethic’ views, and some who like to think that if they get drunk beautiful women will fall all over them :)
It’s interesting that, while my views are probably closer to yours than to Choz’s, I’m not sure it’s for the same reasons. To look at your example, married people may report greater satisfaction in their sex lives, but it also seems to me that married people probably feel more pressure — internal, if nothing else — to validate their marriage and their sex life, given the climate you describe. (Validation of marriage is part of the inner game of marriage, as it were. One reason that young married couples are always telling unmarried couples to hurry up and get married.)
I’d imagine that single people, who are not really beholden to anyone else, might be more honest in discussing dissatisfaction. I think that the pressure not to admit sexual dissatisfaction for a married person could be both very high, and possibly crucial to the success of a marriage. (Since not everyone can be sexually satisfied all the time.)
It’s quite possible that some kind of dissatisfaction with one’s sex life is built into the human condition, and married people just talk about it less. It certainly makes sense in terms of evolution — if the cup is 7/8s full at best, one is more likely to take advantage of other mating opportunities, and have more descendants. (cf. All kinds of books, but most interestingly Jared Diamond’s _The Third Chimpanzee_ on how human mating habits seem to fit this pattern.) Like depression, it could be that a low-level continuing thread of dissatisfaction (which is just part of the human condition) has effectively been pathologized, so that far more people are convinced that they’re dissatisfied in a way that others aren’t, and cannot talk about it.
Of course, that sounds elementary, but I often think things that sound elementary haven’t been taken into account when people set out to do research. They often fail to see past the assumptions of their own culture or personal value system, if you know what I mean.
Finally, the traditional picture of marriage as presented by those who think it’s the cure for social problems in the West seem to ignore all of the seedy underground infrastructure that made a monogamous marriage system actually function without recourse to divorce. London in the Victorian Era was teeming with streetwalkers and whorehouses, and so was 19th Century France. This pattern is much more visible if you travel in other societies, such as in Latin America or East Asia. In such societies, married women often sublimate sexual energies to other areas of their lives, and men get release outside the marriage on a semi-regular basis (and are expected to do so). The rise of divorce as an ostensible antidote to sexual dissatisfaction is problematic, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have other distasteful antidotes to it in the past. We most certainly did, and still do.
(If you don’t believe me, come to South Korea sometime. The sex trade is operating in literally every neighbourhood I’ve walked through in this country. And I’ve heard similar things about lots of other places, too.)
But all that said, I too am not all that happy about how crass all discussion and depiction of sexuality has become. We have a long tradition as humans of laughing about things we’re anxious about, and humans are naturally anxious about sex and sexuality, but there’s funny, and then there’s just crass. This strikes me as just crass. (Once I saw it. I couldn’t until I read the thread, though.)
>I often think things that sound elementary haven’t been taken into account when people set out to do research.
Gord, I don’t think you’re giving the researchers enough credit here. If you want to criticize their methodology, then you need to get specific. I have met and talked with a number of these researchers, and they are extremely aware of problems of distortions in self-reporting and selection effects, and try to avoid and compensation for them. And they are very aware that academic colleagues or those who politically disagree will rip them up in print if their methodology is weak.
For what it’s worth, they report that there is a ’honeymoon’ effect where a newly married couple is extremely positive about their partner and the marriage for the first few years, if I remember correctly. But in long married couples they are brutally honest.
If you’ve been married a long time, I think you will find this very credible.
Because I criticize sexual modernism, it doesn’t mean that I am holding up Victorian marriage as an ideal; it had a lot of problems, and sexual modernism was one reaction to them. I am saying that the current condition of love, sex, and marriage is far from ideal. The current situation will not last, and the only question is how it will change.
Chris: They don’t even look at the philosophical differences of Modernism vs Romanticism. Marketing folks are all about money.
I am sure that if they don’t know why, it still works for some reason. Possibly the one I propose. Lots of factors are picked to affect the target of a successful marketer, whether the marketer is aware of why they work thaqt way. And hey, if ’philes and designers can ponder it, who knows what a marketer thinks before he goes to sleep, or debates at the water cooler. They are still people, sort of. ;)
Gord: It’s interesting that, while my views are probably closer to yours than to Choz’s, I’m not sure it’s for the same reasons.
Despite anything that may seem to sound anti-marriage, I am not. The The only part I am expressing here is that I enjoy crassness, at a philosophical level. I feel that it has a frankness that I empathize with when confronted by the compromises we make each day. existence. other problems. Because I don’t see blatant sexuality as an attack against the better elements of the institution of marriage, I feel free to enjoy the wittier innuendos. Yeah, laughing does ease tension.
validation of ...[any thing one is invested in]...is part of the inner game of [thing]...
The reasons I didn’t mention anything like that is because I thought that bias was assumed, and I’m not attacking marriage. My wife would kill me.~
William: The current situation will not last, and the only question is how it will change.
I am really enjoying this discussion. To the above, I would guess that change will arrive with new technology, and be determined to benefit those who control the technology. By technology, I don’t mean hover cars/robots stuff. Fire, republics, feudalism and literacy were socially important technologies that changed the way things were done.
The postmodernist “tech” approach to L/S/M was one fanciful model built from a mash of open source development concepts, as those have some interesting philosophical impacts, and really answer some of Modernism’s flaws. I know, relationships and mores are not the same as software and the wwweb, but surely the lives of the coming generation are influenced by recent developments?
Burke: Am I missing something? What mug? The top post is empty … ?
Th original post has been severely truncated. I will not try to defeat that by posting the link here, but can describe it as simply a coffee cup, with a cute caption, showing the logo described further in this thread.
>I enjoy crassness, at a philosophical level. I feel that it has a frankness that I empathize with
Interesting. I would draw the lines in a different way. I really have a distaste for the mandatory covering of the women’s hair, as is the case for Christian nuns, Orthodox Jewish women, and traditional Muslim women. To me it is a supressing of women’s sexuality, and a subjugation of women. In answer to the traditional view that women are too tempting to men, I think my wife’s answer: “Control yourselves, men!” is apt.
However, modesty becomes a woman. For if sexual allure is the main thing about a woman—eg Anna Nichole—it is demeaning and dehumanizing to the woman. So there is some kind of balance of modesty and allure that non-traditionalist women strike. This is an individual matter that each woman decides for herself. And it usually changes with age and station in life.
Allure is one thing, and crass is another, though. We have a choice about how to treat sexuality, both in the public media and privately. We can either make it crass or raise it to a higher spiritual plane. When the public media are filled with crassness and coarseness, I think it does affect the tone of everyday life, and especially affects adolescents.
As far as humor, yes crass can be funny, as in Borat’s incredibly crass doings—funnier in the TV show than the movie, but a kind of perverse genius none the less. The A style logo is clever but not funny. And once recognized it sticks around as an image, being crass. Would you want your daughter or son wearing it? Would you want to wear it? We are innundated with crassness, so to me crass is not ’frank’ or daring, but just a piling on of the assaults to human dignity, compassion and beauty that we experience daily.
Maybe the researchers are more fairminded and cannier than I imply, but it seems clear to me that there’s an agenda at work in anyone who sets out to study something like “sexual satisfaction” comparing married couples and singles. And to be brutally honest, I’ve had more than my fair share of experiences of academics saying relatively self-evident things as if they were newfound truths... and relatively inane or wrong things without any apparent sense of how out to lunch those claims were.
I have to say the crassness wouldn’t bug me so much if it stayed in the land of crap one inflicts on oneself... online. Once it’s on shirts, you see it all over and the crassness becomes more, well, widespread. There’s enough crap floating in the world. I’d rather see really beautiful things. (Yeah, crass crap can be enjoyable, but I’ll always take Bach over Britney Spears. Always. But some people like crass stuff. :) )
In a highly politicized subject, it is important to question data. However, simply dismissing research without looking into its quality is of zero help in the search for truth on an important issue.
The information on the comparative sexual satisfaction of married and unmarried comes from The National Health and Social Life Survey, done in 1992 on a sample of 3,500 men and women. You can read about the methodology here. It was carried out for the US Department of Health and Human Services, by professors from University of Chicago and State University of New York at Stoney Brook, and funded by seven large foundations.
This survey is quoted also by sites on information about Gays, as it reports higher percentages of Gays than conservatives like to acknowledge. I cannot find on the internet any criticism of its methodology.
The survey is also the basis of a chapter in The Case for Marriage by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher. The attack on the book by the political opponents don’t criticise this particular survey or the data that Waite and Gallagher use from it.
I conclude from the size of the survey, the professionalism of the authors, and the lack of criticism of it that it is pretty sound.
This was not exactly a flame war. I thought it was a pretty thoughtful and positive exploration of some sensitive issues. Alas, I’ll chat with some of you on this again another time and place, perhaps. Just consider the name of my last typeface, first. ;) Caio!
I think that while we do discuss social political & other not strictly type oriented stuff here and it can and has gotten out of hand before (which isn’t good); and while it is also true that I disagree with much of what is said; I can’t really say that I think there is anything basically wrong with it this expression prior to the point at which it discourages participation. A great deal of it amounts to noise as far as someone who is actually interested in Letters, type, fonts etc. is concerned. But on the other hand these glyphs we make are used to make meaning - so we can’t really divorce ourselves from that relationship on Typophile even as we might seek to keep a signal to noise ratio that’s reasonable.
This thread might be heading in a semi-noisy direction but I don’t think it’s a problem myself. On the other hand I don’t think I would have written in to except for the fact that you felt you had to take the image away. I thought your original post was a totally reasonable.
But to respect your wishes - I won’t follow up further.
As for the logo, it’s cute. What I find offensive about it is the ’guerilla’ marketing (ie, grafitti). But, what works, works, so from a pure marketing standpoint, hard to knock it.
“It would be nice if other people could do the same and let this thread die.”
Oh, c’mon. It’s the internet. Threads take on their own lives and as long as folks aren’t name calling...
>Threads take on their own lives and as long as folks aren’t name calling…
I agree.
Linda innocently opened this thread, but it turned out to be a way different topic than she intended, so I understand she wants it to just go away.
But to me this is a pretty interesting case study on the topic of sex in advertising—and one that involves graphic design and in this case type.
>from a pure marketing standpoint, hard to knock it.
From a marketing standpoint it is great. But I assume you think designers should also be concerned with social responsibility. Are there uses of sex in advertising that do bother you from an ethical point of view?
“From a marketing standpoint it is great. But I assume you think designers should also be concerned with social responsibility.”
People should be concerned with social responsibility.
Designers should be concerned with their client’s needs/goals.
They don’t always mesh and it’s up to each individual to care or not. I don’t pass judgement on either.
“Are there uses of sex in advertising that do bother you from an ethical point of view?”
Sex in ads isn’t the issue, but, rather, society’s reaction to it. And that varies wildly from culture to culture/country to country/city to city. However, the effectiveness of sex in advertising seems to stay relatively consistent regardless of the particular culture.
Sex in ads sometimes bothers me from an intellectual point of view. But, then again, that’s true for most advertising. ;o)
In the end, I think if graphic designers truly cared about social effects of advertising and marketing and consumerism, they wouldn’t be graphic designers. ;0)
Another interesting tangent for this would be to discuss the purpose of the logo. In reading some of the links it seems as if this is an interesting case where the logo has become the product. The logo was designed years before any tangible product was created.
Are there other examples of that? Perhaps the smiley face? Peace symbol?
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5.Mar.2007 12.27pm
Could be the greatest mug ever.
5.Mar.2007 12.58pm
Coarse.
5.Mar.2007 3.17pm
hmm… i think this is actually the logo of a-style, an italian fashion company
a brilliant logo nonetheless.
5.Mar.2007 3.43pm
the logo of ...fashion company
The fact that it is a sales gimick—admittedly an extremely clever one—is not at all surprising.
I think it’s sad that instead of respecting sex as a private expression of love, it is thrown in our faces on logos to sell us stuff.
I am an old guy, and so you may dismiss this as the grumblings of a old man. But the reality is that the public space—advertising, entertainment, politics—is full of anger and sexual provocation devoid of love, and it once was not—at least not on anywhere near such a scale.
I just saw the movie ’Idiocracy’, which captures the coarseness of the contemporary life with such accuracy that it is depressing rather than funny. Of course this logo is brilliant compared to most in the same vein. But it is still cut from the same cloth.
5.Mar.2007 4.22pm
I think it’s sad that instead of respecting sex as a private expression of love, it is thrown in our faces on logos to sell us stuff.
Interesting — I saw the mug as a great piece of art, not as something rather tawdry. Sigmund would find it compelling that you seem to see “sex, sex, sex” everywhere, Bill.
What’s really odd is that I was drawn to the site originally to check out a book entitled
BILL BERKSON’S
SUDDEN ADDRESS: SELECTED LECTURES 1981-2006....
5.Mar.2007 4.33pm
>you seem to see “sex, sex, sex” everywhere, Bill.
I don’t think I’m more sex obsessed than the average guy—which is to say, normal insanity :)
What the designer wants me to do is to puzzle out the graphic so instead of seeing a letter A and two circles I see a couple engaged in sex. The hidden/blatant thing is its cleverness.
Don’t tell me you posted it without seeing it? That would be delightful :) The web site spells it out for you, just in case.
The ’other Bill Berkson’ is I believe a distant cousin, though I haven’t met him.
5.Mar.2007 7.08pm
Don’t tell me you posted it without seeing it? That would be delightful :) The web site spells it out for you, just in case.
Um, well, I saw the title of the page and the colour, and that was about it. That’ll teach me to spend my morning squiting at html and css, and my afternoon working on a very delicate piece of art. When you can’t focus more than 6” in front of your face, looking at anything else other than recognizable letters is, at best, problematic.
The ‘other Bill Berkson’ is I believe a distant cousin, though I haven’t met him.
A likely story.... ;-)
6.Mar.2007 12.33am
I’m afraid I didn’t see it until I saw it in the wikipedia link, I was thinking of a thread that Nick Shinn started about the position of umlauts. Agree about the sales gimmick thing, fortunately their style is not totally obsessed by sex
http://www.astyle.it//A-Style//Motomondiale//Foto%20Assen//Girls//003.ht...
honestly, why do they only sponsor the Assen round of MotoGP?
Tim
6.Mar.2007 12.58am
I saw this earlier today and I thought, “What’s the big deal”- just a capital A and a diaeresis tilted off to the side in a not so special slab. But now I ’get it’ and its not cool. I agree with William. Sex is tossed around too much as a trivial thing- it should be treated tenderly and sacredly.
Mike Diaz :-/
6.Mar.2007 5.00am
>Um, well...
That explains it; bless you, my child :)
I guess this is harder to see than I thought. That makes it even more clever, as people will learn more by a whisper campaign, than by seeing it at first. However, once seen the coarseness is there.
I guess because of the title ’letters have feelings too’ I knew there must be more than meets the eye at first, so I puzzled over it and after half a minute I saw it. Maybe drawing type all day also helps me see stuff—I hope so!
>a likely story
Because the other Bill Berkson, the poet, is a little older and published first, I’ve always used ’William’ as an author.
6.Mar.2007 5.09am
I puzzled as well, maybe it’s the curved image.
I don’t think it’s my innocence ):)
Tim
6.Mar.2007 5.22am
i think you’re both right.
advertising etc. is so full of sleazy jokes, that it’s just enervating and stale, and i, for one, neither want to be annoyed nor bored by sex. it should always be something special.
but…
i still think this is funny, i can’t help myself. admittedly it’s dubious as a logo. which of course makes it a bad logo. hmm… now i’m confused…
6.Mar.2007 7.08am
Took me a while and only after reading the whole thread could I make the two dots turn into little decapitated heads.... sure it’s not my innocence, either. ;)
K.
6.Mar.2007 7.34am
I saw it right away - hmmm what does that say about me?
6.Mar.2007 7.55am
It means you don’t have to deal with bifocals like us old farts.... ;-)
6.Mar.2007 7.56am
Disappointing. No civilized coffee drinker should use this cup. Not because of the image, but because of its shape: the proportions are wrong, and the edge not well defined.
This is more like it:
http://www.e-ad.it/express/immagini-express/Tazzina-espresso.jpg
http://www.coffee-tea-toast.co.uk/images/carml_tea.jpg
6.Mar.2007 8.44am
Googling, I found this story of the A style logo. The interesting bit:
“At this time [from 1991!] there was no income as A-style was just a Logo, nothing more. Some T-Shirts were printed and sold in a friend’s shop in the centre of Milan. Two years ago Marco was presented to Massimo, a real gentleman that worked in the clothing business, who saw the real potential of this Logo in the “Streetwear” clothing market. There are now 2 factories that make only A-Style products. Marketing is still done in exactly the same way, Gorilla, Abusive, or call it what you like but very effective and a HUGE success.”
6.Mar.2007 9.01am
So it’s sort of like FCUK. Come up with an idea that appeals to 14-year-olds and watch the money roll in.
6.Mar.2007 9.08am
Linda,
I have trifocals and I saw it right away—I am an old dog too :-)
ChrisL
6.Mar.2007 9.12am
>old dog
Look out, Dezcom has slipped his leash :)
6.Mar.2007 9.19am
Or perhaps had a colonoscopy :-P
ChrisL
6.Mar.2007 10.53am
dezcom> umm....... eew!
7.Mar.2007 12.17am
I’ve tried to write this several times now. Let’s just say I am being a devil’s advocate, for the sake of good conversation.
I can’t say I really mind the exploitation of libido in advertising. It makes sense. I think the feeble teasing of ’FCUK’ was fairly lame compared to this, which has some subtlety, but that is irrelevant to the fact that either is a graphic innuendo.
Although it probably sounds terribly new-fangled, a lot of people (mine, younger and older generations) I’ve grown up with enjoyed a variety of sexual activity, and some have found intimacy and meaningful relationships within and without that arena. Sex is a healthily rewarding expression of genetic drive. Love is about respect, trust, patience and some of our other higher traits.
Cuisine is a less dangerous sibling, because people don’t “carry the bloodline” with a perfectly-prepared lobster.
In marketing, one’s desire to be rewarded and recognized for effort, to belong to a community and feel wanted, and to feel secure are constantly promised. That is because it is what we want and if we think the product will give that, we’ll pay for it.
The funny thing is, all of these things these things you receive from those who love you. A lot of those people you never picked, but were handed by genetics, circumstance, etc. But there is one who loves you that you pick. Your mate. Partner/spouse/lover etc. Probably, the one you most commonly procreate with.
Sex is demoted to a symbol of love, instead of being recognized as its own weird thing. And thus, it becomes not a cheap and tawdry thing that is largely harmless, especially with modern technology and hygiene. It becomes a poor symbol of something great, complicated and inherently hard to sell. Marketers would be suicidal not to value sex so greatly.
7.Mar.2007 12.41am
And : with Arabic K?
7.Mar.2007 2.50am
I don’t get it. Is the umlaut two breasts? two balls?
please explain.
alex
.........................................................
Bison Design
Spön
7.Mar.2007 3.58am
Two heads.
7.Mar.2007 5.44am
Legs on shoulders?! Or Rotate -90.0 and look gain?!
7.Mar.2007 6.51am
Choz, the view you express, one variety of ’sexual modernism’, has been around for approximately a century, and advocates the separation of love, sex and marriage. You can read the history of it in this book.
The advocates of sexual modernism have typically regard those who disagree with them as backward, stuck in outdated views of the pre-contraception era.
However, in my view, and the view of many others, now the situation is reversed. Sexual modernism has proven to be a huge failure over the past century, both in theory and in practice, and its current advocates are ignoring the lessons of the past century, and particularly the last 50 years. Just to cite one fact, married people report more satisfying sex lives than unmarried.
If you are interested, there is now a big literature out there on these issues, with a huge amount of academic research. Good internet sites, should you be interested, are the Center for Marriage and Family, the National Marriage Project, a research center, and SmartMarriages.com.
7.Mar.2007 7.30am
Some might find Your link to the Center for Marriage and Family at the Institute for American Values contains material that is far more offending than a doggy style A.
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7.Mar.2007 7.49am
Fredo, I don’t think you can avoid offending those who are offended simply by views differing from their own.
I think the debate about the relations of love, sex, and marriage is an important debate, wherever you stand on it. Those who want to avoid it and the associated research in my opinion do so at their own peril.
Incidentally, sexual modernists themselves would be split on the A-style logo. As the history book I linked to explains, there is a split between romantic modernists and ’pleasure ethic’ modernists. The romantic modernists want to keep love and sex together, but split those off from marriage. Pleasure ethic modernists, like Kinsey, are in favor of separating love and sex, regarding the pleasure from sex as being a higher priority. The romantic modernists would not like the logo, and the pleasure ethic ones would.
In my own view, both traditional, pre-1900 views and sexual modernism are passé and destined to the dustbin of history.
p.s. You might be interested in the recent study of marriage and family in Scandinavia. I find it refreshingly objective and very interesting.
7.Mar.2007 9.54am
I hope no on is so offended that they have a serious problem with wither William or I speaking on this subject. This is interesting, and design is nothing without exploring the society in which it speaks. If you do, however, please do not marry either of us. :)
I personally do not think so much of “Relationship/Sexual Modernism” that it is a valid solution to all weaknesses of prior models. Postmodernism has evolved because I am not the only one who thinks this way. Futura and OCR-A did not make serif faces obsolete, to draw a parallel. Today’s myriad of divergent faces is how thew world wants it.
The point I was suggesting above is that Sexual Romanticism, as well as Moral Romanticism, has had much more of an impact on the power of sex in advertising than Sexual Modernism has, by overemphasizing the bond of sex and love. Due to the sanctioning of marriage by other major institutions in the classical form, 19th century views have persisted alongside modern ones. Marketing exploits the weaknesses in the romantic model because they work, and they only work at that level we have permitted.
My prediction is that you will slowly see a new type of “postmodern” ethical distinction. An atomization of the facets that make up social living into tiny shards, that exist solely with the intention to be reassembled. This is a geeky example, but perhaps you might think of it as each person is a microkernel, with access to a million moral-memes to access and build into their identity. Each is developed discretely. Then one’s life would be the runtime compilation. This would mean the untangling of marriage, love AND sex from each other, then being refined and reintegrated. I am not saying I endorse this, just that it would mimic our behavior socially in other fields.
It may appear, one hundred years from now, that our use of sex to sell hemmeroid cremes, pickup trucks and lumber are nonsensical and quanint. I think it will likely take longer, due to biological issues, but I still currently hold Romanticism at fault more than the Modernist distinctions, for the power of sex in advertising.
7.Mar.2007 10.28am
I just got an email asking me to be clarify the last post.
Marketing relies on traditional views of love to empower sex as a symbol of it.
7.Mar.2007 10.35am
Marketing relies on tabulations of data that shows they sold more Budlight than before when the have commercials with barely clad babes in them. They don’t even look at the philisophical differences of Modernism vs Romanticism. Marketing folks are all about money. T&A sells beer and cars. Romantic stuff sells greeting cards and engagement rings. This is not a philosophically based notion.
ChrisL
7.Mar.2007 10.44am
The A-style marketers deliberately used a ’guerilla’ marketing approach as they thought it would sell to the group who would buy their stuff. They are young people who like think of themselves as ’rebels’ and ’advanced’. So they plastered it all over the streets. The marketers probably don’t give a damn whether the people they are successfully selling to are deluded fools or leaders into a better future. So long as they buy, they’re happy.
So I think Chris has it about right as far as marketing: marketers just do whatever they think will work for their target population. However, I do think they look at the philosophy of their target polulation: some marketing targets those with traditional views, some with romantic views, some with ’pleasure ethic’ views, and some who like to think that if they get drunk beautiful women will fall all over them :)
7.Mar.2007 6.56pm
William,
It’s interesting that, while my views are probably closer to yours than to Choz’s, I’m not sure it’s for the same reasons. To look at your example, married people may report greater satisfaction in their sex lives, but it also seems to me that married people probably feel more pressure — internal, if nothing else — to validate their marriage and their sex life, given the climate you describe. (Validation of marriage is part of the inner game of marriage, as it were. One reason that young married couples are always telling unmarried couples to hurry up and get married.)
I’d imagine that single people, who are not really beholden to anyone else, might be more honest in discussing dissatisfaction. I think that the pressure not to admit sexual dissatisfaction for a married person could be both very high, and possibly crucial to the success of a marriage. (Since not everyone can be sexually satisfied all the time.)
It’s quite possible that some kind of dissatisfaction with one’s sex life is built into the human condition, and married people just talk about it less. It certainly makes sense in terms of evolution — if the cup is 7/8s full at best, one is more likely to take advantage of other mating opportunities, and have more descendants. (cf. All kinds of books, but most interestingly Jared Diamond’s _The Third Chimpanzee_ on how human mating habits seem to fit this pattern.) Like depression, it could be that a low-level continuing thread of dissatisfaction (which is just part of the human condition) has effectively been pathologized, so that far more people are convinced that they’re dissatisfied in a way that others aren’t, and cannot talk about it.
Of course, that sounds elementary, but I often think things that sound elementary haven’t been taken into account when people set out to do research. They often fail to see past the assumptions of their own culture or personal value system, if you know what I mean.
Finally, the traditional picture of marriage as presented by those who think it’s the cure for social problems in the West seem to ignore all of the seedy underground infrastructure that made a monogamous marriage system actually function without recourse to divorce. London in the Victorian Era was teeming with streetwalkers and whorehouses, and so was 19th Century France. This pattern is much more visible if you travel in other societies, such as in Latin America or East Asia. In such societies, married women often sublimate sexual energies to other areas of their lives, and men get release outside the marriage on a semi-regular basis (and are expected to do so). The rise of divorce as an ostensible antidote to sexual dissatisfaction is problematic, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have other distasteful antidotes to it in the past. We most certainly did, and still do.
(If you don’t believe me, come to South Korea sometime. The sex trade is operating in literally every neighbourhood I’ve walked through in this country. And I’ve heard similar things about lots of other places, too.)
But all that said, I too am not all that happy about how crass all discussion and depiction of sexuality has become. We have a long tradition as humans of laughing about things we’re anxious about, and humans are naturally anxious about sex and sexuality, but there’s funny, and then there’s just crass. This strikes me as just crass. (Once I saw it. I couldn’t until I read the thread, though.)
7.Mar.2007 7.28pm
>I often think things that sound elementary haven’t been taken into account when people set out to do research.
Gord, I don’t think you’re giving the researchers enough credit here. If you want to criticize their methodology, then you need to get specific. I have met and talked with a number of these researchers, and they are extremely aware of problems of distortions in self-reporting and selection effects, and try to avoid and compensation for them. And they are very aware that academic colleagues or those who politically disagree will rip them up in print if their methodology is weak.
For what it’s worth, they report that there is a ’honeymoon’ effect where a newly married couple is extremely positive about their partner and the marriage for the first few years, if I remember correctly. But in long married couples they are brutally honest.
If you’ve been married a long time, I think you will find this very credible.
Because I criticize sexual modernism, it doesn’t mean that I am holding up Victorian marriage as an ideal; it had a lot of problems, and sexual modernism was one reaction to them. I am saying that the current condition of love, sex, and marriage is far from ideal. The current situation will not last, and the only question is how it will change.
7.Mar.2007 8.38pm
Am I missing something? What mug? The top post is empty ... ?
7.Mar.2007 9.23pm
Chris: They don’t even look at the philosophical differences of Modernism vs Romanticism. Marketing folks are all about money.
I am sure that if they don’t know why, it still works for some reason. Possibly the one I propose. Lots of factors are picked to affect the target of a successful marketer, whether the marketer is aware of why they work thaqt way. And hey, if ’philes and designers can ponder it, who knows what a marketer thinks before he goes to sleep, or debates at the water cooler. They are still people, sort of. ;)
Gord: It’s interesting that, while my views are probably closer to yours than to Choz’s, I’m not sure it’s for the same reasons.
Despite anything that may seem to sound anti-marriage, I am not. The The only part I am expressing here is that I enjoy crassness, at a philosophical level. I feel that it has a frankness that I empathize with when confronted by the compromises we make each day. existence. other problems. Because I don’t see blatant sexuality as an attack against the better elements of the institution of marriage, I feel free to enjoy the wittier innuendos. Yeah, laughing does ease tension.
validation of ...[any thing one is invested in]...is part of the inner game of [thing]...
The reasons I didn’t mention anything like that is because I thought that bias was assumed, and I’m not attacking marriage. My wife would kill me.~
William: The current situation will not last, and the only question is how it will change.
I am really enjoying this discussion. To the above, I would guess that change will arrive with new technology, and be determined to benefit those who control the technology. By technology, I don’t mean hover cars/robots stuff. Fire, republics, feudalism and literacy were socially important technologies that changed the way things were done.
The postmodernist “tech” approach to L/S/M was one fanciful model built from a mash of open source development concepts, as those have some interesting philosophical impacts, and really answer some of Modernism’s flaws. I know, relationships and mores are not the same as software and the wwweb, but surely the lives of the coming generation are influenced by recent developments?
Burke: Am I missing something? What mug? The top post is empty … ?
Th original post has been severely truncated. I will not try to defeat that by posting the link here, but can describe it as simply a coffee cup, with a cute caption, showing the logo described further in this thread.
8.Mar.2007 7.12am
>I enjoy crassness, at a philosophical level. I feel that it has a frankness that I empathize with
Interesting. I would draw the lines in a different way. I really have a distaste for the mandatory covering of the women’s hair, as is the case for Christian nuns, Orthodox Jewish women, and traditional Muslim women. To me it is a supressing of women’s sexuality, and a subjugation of women. In answer to the traditional view that women are too tempting to men, I think my wife’s answer: “Control yourselves, men!” is apt.
However, modesty becomes a woman. For if sexual allure is the main thing about a woman—eg Anna Nichole—it is demeaning and dehumanizing to the woman. So there is some kind of balance of modesty and allure that non-traditionalist women strike. This is an individual matter that each woman decides for herself. And it usually changes with age and station in life.
Allure is one thing, and crass is another, though. We have a choice about how to treat sexuality, both in the public media and privately. We can either make it crass or raise it to a higher spiritual plane. When the public media are filled with crassness and coarseness, I think it does affect the tone of everyday life, and especially affects adolescents.
As far as humor, yes crass can be funny, as in Borat’s incredibly crass doings—funnier in the TV show than the movie, but a kind of perverse genius none the less. The A style logo is clever but not funny. And once recognized it sticks around as an image, being crass. Would you want your daughter or son wearing it? Would you want to wear it? We are innundated with crassness, so to me crass is not ’frank’ or daring, but just a piling on of the assaults to human dignity, compassion and beauty that we experience daily.
8.Mar.2007 10.50am
William,
Maybe the researchers are more fairminded and cannier than I imply, but it seems clear to me that there’s an agenda at work in anyone who sets out to study something like “sexual satisfaction” comparing married couples and singles. And to be brutally honest, I’ve had more than my fair share of experiences of academics saying relatively self-evident things as if they were newfound truths... and relatively inane or wrong things without any apparent sense of how out to lunch those claims were.
I have to say the crassness wouldn’t bug me so much if it stayed in the land of crap one inflicts on oneself... online. Once it’s on shirts, you see it all over and the crassness becomes more, well, widespread. There’s enough crap floating in the world. I’d rather see really beautiful things. (Yeah, crass crap can be enjoyable, but I’ll always take Bach over Britney Spears. Always. But some people like crass stuff. :) )
8.Mar.2007 11.22am
Linda, did you censor yourself? Or were you censored?
8.Mar.2007 11.37am
Apparently the Cup has runneth over.
ChrisL
8.Mar.2007 11.47am
Dezcom> always with the puns.... ahahahahha
8.Mar.2007 11.54am
Gord,
In a highly politicized subject, it is important to question data. However, simply dismissing research without looking into its quality is of zero help in the search for truth on an important issue.
The information on the comparative sexual satisfaction of married and unmarried comes from The National Health and Social Life Survey, done in 1992 on a sample of 3,500 men and women. You can read about the methodology here. It was carried out for the US Department of Health and Human Services, by professors from University of Chicago and State University of New York at Stoney Brook, and funded by seven large foundations.
This survey is quoted also by sites on information about Gays, as it reports higher percentages of Gays than conservatives like to acknowledge. I cannot find on the internet any criticism of its methodology.
The survey is also the basis of a chapter in The Case for Marriage by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher. The attack on the book by the political opponents don’t criticise this particular survey or the data that Waite and Gallagher use from it.
I conclude from the size of the survey, the professionalism of the authors, and the lack of criticism of it that it is pretty sound.
8.Mar.2007 12.48pm
Eben wrote: Linda, did you censor yourself? Or were you censored?
I censored myself: it was either that or haul out The Silence Brigade real quick.
It would be nice if other people could do the same and let this thread die.
(hint, hint)
8.Mar.2007 1.00pm
’kay.
8.Mar.2007 2.30pm
This was not exactly a flame war. I thought it was a pretty thoughtful and positive exploration of some sensitive issues. Alas, I’ll chat with some of you on this again another time and place, perhaps. Just consider the name of my last typeface, first. ;) Caio!
8.Mar.2007 3.06pm
I think that while we do discuss social political & other not strictly type oriented stuff here and it can and has gotten out of hand before (which isn’t good); and while it is also true that I disagree with much of what is said; I can’t really say that I think there is anything basically wrong with it this expression prior to the point at which it discourages participation. A great deal of it amounts to noise as far as someone who is actually interested in Letters, type, fonts etc. is concerned. But on the other hand these glyphs we make are used to make meaning - so we can’t really divorce ourselves from that relationship on Typophile even as we might seek to keep a signal to noise ratio that’s reasonable.
This thread might be heading in a semi-noisy direction but I don’t think it’s a problem myself. On the other hand I don’t think I would have written in to except for the fact that you felt you had to take the image away. I thought your original post was a totally reasonable.
But to respect your wishes - I won’t follow up further.
9.Mar.2007 6.51am
As for the logo, it’s cute. What I find offensive about it is the ’guerilla’ marketing (ie, grafitti). But, what works, works, so from a pure marketing standpoint, hard to knock it.
“It would be nice if other people could do the same and let this thread die.”
Oh, c’mon. It’s the internet. Threads take on their own lives and as long as folks aren’t name calling...
9.Mar.2007 7.43am
>Threads take on their own lives and as long as folks aren’t name calling…
I agree.
Linda innocently opened this thread, but it turned out to be a way different topic than she intended, so I understand she wants it to just go away.
But to me this is a pretty interesting case study on the topic of sex in advertising—and one that involves graphic design and in this case type.
>from a pure marketing standpoint, hard to knock it.
From a marketing standpoint it is great. But I assume you think designers should also be concerned with social responsibility. Are there uses of sex in advertising that do bother you from an ethical point of view?
9.Mar.2007 8.30am
“From a marketing standpoint it is great. But I assume you think designers should also be concerned with social responsibility.”
People should be concerned with social responsibility.
Designers should be concerned with their client’s needs/goals.
They don’t always mesh and it’s up to each individual to care or not. I don’t pass judgement on either.
“Are there uses of sex in advertising that do bother you from an ethical point of view?”
Sex in ads isn’t the issue, but, rather, society’s reaction to it. And that varies wildly from culture to culture/country to country/city to city. However, the effectiveness of sex in advertising seems to stay relatively consistent regardless of the particular culture.
Sex in ads sometimes bothers me from an intellectual point of view. But, then again, that’s true for most advertising. ;o)
In the end, I think if graphic designers truly cared about social effects of advertising and marketing and consumerism, they wouldn’t be graphic designers. ;0)
9.Mar.2007 8.34am
Another interesting tangent for this would be to discuss the purpose of the logo. In reading some of the links it seems as if this is an interesting case where the logo has become the product. The logo was designed years before any tangible product was created.
Are there other examples of that? Perhaps the smiley face? Peace symbol?