If you haven’t already, check out Anton Beeke. Eye mag has an interview here. I don’t know if he ever “flopped,” but he shocked the Dutch, which isn’t all that easy.

I am by no means an *important* designer but have a kind of interesting case study. I was part of a team that was charged with redesigning Betty Crocker cookbooks to make them more upscale - this was in the mid/late 80s. We trained the photographers, reworked all the designs, individualized them, etc. Upshot was they didn’t sell as well and so Betty reverted back to their more generic midmarket look. This was before Martha Stewart Living & Real Simple hit the scene; I think the public appetite (so to speak) for more elegant cookbook design has improved since then.

Hmmm... it just occurred to me that flopped design concepts could make an excellent senior thesis...

My college’s gallery, in a joint effort by our graphics program and the local chapter of AIGA, put together an interesting show a couple of years ago. Titled LOGO [where the first ’O’ is the red circle with a diagonal line through it], the show featured AIGA member logo designs that were either rejected or never implemented. It was a pretty cool exhibit. Some of the work never made it for very obvious reasons, and some of it was actually very very good, but still “failed.”

I think you need to define “flopped”. If the product wasn’t successful, can you really blame the design? It might be easier to focus on redesigns. And there are some baaaaddd ones out there, like Wrigleys gum. But I don’t know if it affected sales, and that’s what defines a design’s success, innit? And there will always be some public resistance to change.

The Saks Fifth Avenue Optima-esque logo did nothing for me and now they are back to a redraw of their original script logo.

Or do you just want to focus on designs that designers dislike?

I loathe the Verizon logo - as do most designers I know, for example, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for them.

Another interesting one, the triangle on the Morgan Stanley logo that Landor got paid umpteen millions to design - and now it’s gone.

Or... a friend is rebranding Marriott. I told him I liked the M in the circle and he told me it’s considered to be ineffective and they’re dropping it.

None of these qualify as either risky or shocking tho.

I.D. (Industrial Design, not fashion/music) magazine has an article this month about “What doesn’t make a design classic” as in, why have some designs disappeared while others have become classics. I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t know if it fits your thesis.

>Has anyone ever found good writing about important designers who took big risks and flopped?

Surprised no one has mentioned the ’less than succesful’ Apple products like the Cube thingie, Newton, Mac Mini, etc. all hailed as “great” designs that failed to exite the public and were axed.

Great topic.

In the type world, I can think of cases where an “elite” (and generally good) designer made a font for a client but then the client rejected it, or at least never bothered to use it: Unger’s Capitolium, Frutiger’s Devanagari, and LettError’s MTV typeface. But I don’t know about your “big risk” here - the designers did get paid.

In type design it’s hard to see “big risk” being a factor, since you already know you’re not really going to be rich even if your work is successful! You put an inadvisable amount of hours into it either way. :-/

Maybe you could say Cassandre took big risks with the way he made fonts, like Peignot (which was actually intended as an attempt to reform the Latin alphabet). When these risks didn’t pay off, he killed himself.

hhp

>In the type world

Maybe Multiple Masters, TrueType GX, would qualify?

Commercial failures are one area that’s interesting, but I’m also looking at campaigns that backfired in one unexpected way for another. For example, both PETA and Moveon.org had their Super Bowl advertisements rejected, mostly because their previous ads had shocked or pissed off so many people that those organizations are becoming persona non grata. Compare that with Benneton, whose ads managed just the right amount of offensiveness to get attention, make people angry, and still stay in print so long that people stopped paying attention.

You might want to look at some of the sports sponsorship for examples of failure, as one team has to lose after all. Examples might be the tobacco companies that sponsor Formula One cars, but who’s logos only appear at 3 out of 17 events, or the Star Wars sponsorship of the Red Bull F1 team a few years back atMonaco, where both Red Bull cars lasted only a few laps - but my favorite of all - the Linux sponsored Indy 500 car that was the first to break down ;-)

You’ve reminded me of the brilliant bouma-based tricks that the tobacco
companies used to pull for their F1 sponsorships! Why did those stop?

hhp

Here’s one of my favorites: That little symbol Prince tried to adopt as his identity. I called it “hook, line and sinker”. Notice, he’s back to being Prince.

I had a client (Fizzy Lizzy) who is now on the 4th design for her product line in as many years. I realized pretty quickly that she’d drive me nuts and we parted amicably, but she had another designer take over, and then had it redesigned again a few months later. I actually like the latest one, it’s a vast improvement on the other three. She saw her market share erode to a competitive product with a much cooler design and almost an identical name (Izze).

Here’s one of my favorites: That little symbol Prince tried to adopt as his identity. I called it “hook, line and sinker”. Notice, he’s back to being Prince.

That one actually worked as intended. Warner was using an insane contract he signed in the late 1970s to force him to put out everything but the music he really wanted to. He was so pissed at Warner that he used a contract loophole to force them to market all of his material under the symbol instead of his name, causing his album sales to tank.

>That one actually worked as intended.

Maybe in terms of $’s, but it still made him look a bit silly in the eyes of the public? You can spin pretty much all of these failures either way if you really want to.

Patty,

I think Prince used that symbol during a period when he didn’t have the legal right to use the name “Prince”....Weird and sad huh. People used to call him “Symbol”, since nobody knew how it was supposed to be pronounced. When he got the rights back from his old label, he could use the name again. Not so much a failed campaign as an awkward way to deal with legal restrictions. Not to mention typographically limiting. Though, for a while there, you could download a font with that symbol in it.

In the case of the soda, and other mass-market items, the very dynamics of competition make all the difference. It’s like beta/vhs. Someone has to lose. I’m intrigued with this because it’s clear it isn’t always the best product or most meritorious that succeeds.

it’s clear it isn’t always the best product or most meritorious that succeeds.

Especially since Fizzy Lizzy tastes much better than Izze. This was also a matter of the client being her own worst enemy. She had pretty dreadful taste - whenever I presented choices to her she invariably picked my least favorite. Her husband (and partner) had better taste, but she only trusted her own judgment since the product was really hers. She could never articulate what she liked/didn’t like either. Nightmare client.

>That one actually worked as intended.

I think it works in the sense that it’s made it infinitely easier for me to give people directions up 95 to Boston.

“When you get to a sign with the Prince symbol on it....”

If I remember correctly, years ago, Sagmeister Inc. sent out invitations to an event which consisted of a box containing either a banana or a peach along with the invite. Some of the fruit had began to mold and decompose by the time the reached their recipients.

uh... this one

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/6724245.stm

if a design is giving people epilepsy, then there’s a problem.

The very first anti-smoking commercial on TV that I can remember was Tony Curtis walking by a row of people (butcher, baker, Indian chief, etc) and saying to each one “I don’t smoke, cigarettes that is.”

6 months or so later he was arrested for marijuana and they pulled it instantly.

Celebrity endorsements often backfire for this or that reason.

Anybody remember the OJ ham promos? They didn’t last long after the “event”. For some reason they didn’t work anymore with the tagline “It’s the other white meat.”

Apologies all around…

piece

At the time he was TAFKAP
(The Artist Formerly Known as Prince):

“2: Hey man, do you have a font for the TAFKAP or should I go with a JPEG?”

(http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TAFKAP)

There was the Arch Deluxe. McDonalds decided all of a sudden that it wanted to counter the perception that it appealed only to children’s tastes, so they created their vision of a “grown-up” burger and set to work insulting their customers with ads that implied that it’s immature to want a burger made to your preferences if you don’t like onions. On the design front, the restaurants were filled with hanging signs that all showed close-up photos of little kids making disgusted faces, each accompanied by “quotes” of their reactions to the Arch Deluxe like “It looks gross. It’s got all that yucky stuff on it.” Somehow this didn’t make a lot of people want one. Epic failure.

Celebrity endorsements often backfire for this or that reason

Ben Johnson advertised milk for the Finnish dairy Valio. Then he was caught and the ad was seen no more...

I was involved with Renault advertising in 1994 and we used a lot of F1 photos. Then Ayrton Senna crashed and we had to make changes very quickly. If my memory serves me right, they had a full page advert in the biggest national newspaper on the sunday Senna died, but thankfully his face or car number weren’t visible.

Sorry, that wasn’t really about risk taking and failing designers.

How about the British Airways tailfin design?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1325127.stm

Some flops are not a matter of the aesthetics being wrong, but rather the practical aspects of the design. The most infamous example that I can think of is the butterfly ballot that gave us George Bush.

PS: the asktog.com website looks really good and has a lot more examples and analysis of serious practical blunders.

Here we go again scapegoating.

hhp

Bill, the butterfly ballot is an excellent example of a design that flopped! With epic consequences. 3000 Jews in Palm Beach voting for Pat Buchanan - I don’t think so... even he didn’t think so.

“Epic consequences”?! Bullocks. We had it coming either way.
Design isn’t as world-changing as we might like to think.

hhp

Is Bollocks filtered out? Or Bullocks the LA version?

Actually I forgot a “c” in there. ;-) No, my bad - thanks for
the correction... and the testing to make sure it’s not filtered!

hhp

The butterfly ballot worked as it was intended to. You wouldn’t say Domino’s logo is a bad design just because it successfully sells nasty-ass pizza.

The butterfly ballot worked as it was intended to.

You’re saying it was designed by the republicans then?

Here is info on the designer of the butterfly ballot.

According to a contemporaneous CNN story:

“Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa Lepore said she put the presidential candidates on two pages to keep the print size big enough for the county’s many elderly voters. She has acknowledged it was a mistake.”

From these two stories it seems to be just incompetence, which first hurt a republican (Bob Dole) and then a democrat (Al Gore).

Yes, incompetence.
But not of individuals, but an entire people, an entire culture.

The people doing the peon-screwing aren’t incompetent at all.

hhp

I had long speculated as to what was put on McDonald’s Arch Deluxe to make it taste “adult”.

If you want a good example of design that flopped, look no further than the New York Islanders 1995-96 logo. Fans hated it so much, it lasted only one season.

I first bought Izze solely for the packaging. And wouldn’t you know, it was tasty!

But yeah, Izze is beautifully done — smart, sophisticated but fun.

RE Prince — for a number of years while living in Minneapolis, the local press (and I think, some of the national press too) did not bother to use his sign/mark name thing, but instead referred to him as TAFKAP. (The Artist Formerly Known as Prince). This despite the fact that he went to great lengths to send special, custom-made fonts of the sign-thingy to every media outlet around, with instructions on installation/use. Yeah, that was most definitely an identity flop.

I suspect Morgan Stanley removed the triangle because it was curiously similar to some insurance company...their name escapes me at the moment, but their logo is essentially a solid blue triangle with their name in it.

This is VERRRRY bad design, for obvious reasons:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/25/pediatric_centers_ba.html