Tweak of Imperfection
The siren is like a super mermaid.
A mermaid with one tail is just plain old mermaid. (Sorry, Ariel.)
But a siren is often depicted with two tails.
She might seem like an unusual choice for the face of a coffee company.
But there's a pretty interesting backstory as to how and why the siren came to be.
It was 1971 and the founders had landed on the name Starbucks, inspired by Moby Dick.
Next up : creating a logo.
Next up : creating a logo.
The three founders hired a consultant named Terry Heckler.
Heckler carefully studied over Old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an Old 16th-century Norwegian woodcut of a twin-tailed mermaid.
*The mysterious, nautical figure called to them, as sirens do.
The mermaid was exotic.
She was also topless.
At first, and despite some complaints, Starbucks just rolled with it.
As executive chairman
Howard Schultz later explained,
"Bare breasted mermaid was supposed to be as seductive as the coffee itself."
Howard Schultz later explained,
"Bare breasted mermaid was supposed to be as seductive as the coffee itself."
But then the time came to put the logo on the delivery trucks, and that was problematic.
Today her eyes command a warm confidence.
Her hair ripples
as an ocean wave that laps provocatively over her breasts.
As the face of
Starbucks since 2011, the Siren logo is alluring by design,
beckoning you into
the store to grab a latte or pastry.
Her face is so perfect,
it is its own mirror, with the left and right sides copied to match up just Right.
it is its own mirror, with the left and right sides copied to match up just Right.
But when the global branding team at Lippincott was staring at her on a wall seven years ago, she just didn’t work–and they didn’t know why.
She wasn’t
beautiful;
she was uncannily beautiful,
a bit creepy, to be honest,
she was uncannily beautiful,
a bit creepy, to be honest,
giving you a funny feeling in your stomach like she was a shell of a
person, like an alien or a robot pretending to be human.
“As a team we were like,
‘There’s something not working here,
what is it?'”recounts global creative director Connie Birdsall.
“It was like,
‘Oh, we need to step back and put some of that humanity back in.
‘Oh, we need to step back and put some of that humanity back in.
The imperfection was
important to making her really successful as a mark.”
Specifically, Lippincott realized that to look human, the Siren couldn’t be symmetrical,
Despite the fact that symmetry is the well-studied definition of human beauty.
She had to be asymmetrical.
Can you see it now that you know?
Look closely at her eyes.
Can you see it now that you know?
Look closely at her eyes.
Do you notice how her
nose dips lower on the right than the left?
That was the fix of just a few
pixels that made the Siren work.
“In the end, just for the face part of the drawing, there’s a slight asymmetry to it.
It has a bit more shadow on the right side of the face,” says design
partner Bogdan Geana.
“It felt a bit more human, and felt less like a perfectly
cut mask.”
Thank you for reading.
Blog #9 :)
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