Month: January 2021

On June 6th, 2019, Jamba Juice decided to ditch the juice and revamp its logo entirely to showcase its expanding menu. The redesign was headed by Focus Brands Inc, a large company in charge of many of the food brands we know and love. The purpose of this redesign was to push into the more modernist style of today’s society and also appeal to its broad spectrum of consumers. I feel that the rebranding was successful in some aspects, but I have issues with several parts of the redesigned logo.

The first thing I find hard to accept about the redesign is the name change. Moving from a longer name to a shorter name has been a popular trend for many industries, like Dominoes Pizza shifting to Dominoes. The goal of this change is to allow for the inclusion of items on the menu that no longer fit in with the old name, but I think it tarnishes the history of the original design and the company. Jamba Juice had a natural rhythm and a sweet alliteration that is missed in the newer name. Because of this, the new name feels incomplete when viewed. This is just my personal opinion of course and is probably influenced by the familiarity and nostalgia I have with the logo and name. Children growing up who know Jamba Juice as Jamba should have no previous ties and therefore won’t experience the same issue I am having. 

Besides this name change, I feel like the designer missed the mark with the decision to not include that deep red that feels like the focal point of the old logo. I have always loved the color palette for Jamba Juice, because of the cohesiveness, the gradient created in the logomark, and the contrast created by the warm reds and cool greens present in the design. The newer design was stripped of multiple shades, which removed that lovely contrast and the seamless blend in the blender tornado. While I disagree with this simplification and miss the red tones dearly, the choice to bring color into the type itself was a nice touch. The original brown/black of the typeface was both jarring and inconsistent with the rest of the design. Because of this, it was easy to view the word mark and illustrative mark as two separate pieces that were thrown together haphazardly. 

This brings me to my final discussion topic, the font choice and new placement. I actually found this change to be surprisingly successful. While the old typeface was distinct, it felt robotic and too clunky for the service it represented. This new handwritten type is organic and smooth, like a perfectly blended smoothie. The logo feels more compact and easy to place, and the type is interacting with the tornado graphic with much more success than the old design. The name takes priority, and the j in Jamba seems to be containing the swirl like a blender would contain its contents. I do, however, dislike the ™ located in between the swirl and the j. It seems forced and like the designer didn’t know where to place the trademark. In its current location, I feel like the company is trademarking just the colorful swirl. 

Overall I think the new design of Jamba, forever Jamba Juice in my mind, had many successful design elements going for it but missed the mark in many aspects. While I feel that the name change does achieve the company’s goals of encompassing all the non-juice related items on the menu, it doesn’t have the same ring as the previous name and alliteration. The simplification of the color palette doesn’t help either and instead takes away from the design as a whole. I understand that they were trying to modernize and minimalize, but I miss the depth of the old palette. While I struggle with some of the changes made, I admit the logo as a design is more successful as a whole because of the new type placement, type color, and organic font. I just feel that the design could have been more successful by maintaining some of the original charms of its older counterpart. In summary, I’m not mad, just a little disappointed. 

I found Marshall McLuhan’s idea of “hot” and “cold” mediums to be interesting and a perspective that I had yet to hear, but I’d hardly say this idea was accurate as it has no scientific basis behind it. Besides this lack of testing and observation, the idea tried to define mediums that are fluid and constantly changing, not only with time but from item to item. What I mean by this is that not every individual had the same quality television (or vision) or the same signal for example. Lower quality or poor signal on television (or someone who has poor vision) would require more participation to decipher the fuzzy images coming through than one that came in clearer.

However, I do believe “the medium is the message” to have truth to it. The medium in which we intake information has a huge effect on how we process that information. We react differently when seeing a tragedy versus reading about a tragedy. In a recent photography class, I had learned about the effects of photoshopping in newspapers and something that stood out to me was the removal of color in wartime images. A black and white image hid things like gruesome wounds and blood in a way colored images on the internet could not. These different mediums affected how we saw tragedy like this, and how we responded to it as a whole. This is why digital photography and the internet helped push the idea that war was awful and gruesome, something newsprint and radio could not convey in the same way.

I think this idea that the medium has a huge impact on our design work should be at the back of our minds constantly. What medium would add to our intended meaning instead of subtracting? How can we communicate the most effectively with our audience? I would hate to push a message of nature conservation and the reduction of our plastic use, and have it be printed on giant, non_recyclable plastic signage. Design is more than just what we communicate, but how we chose to communicate it!

My name is Lena and I’m a designer currently taking classes through Oregon State University. I also have an interest and am currently studying psychology. My hope is to incorporate what I know about the human mind into my design work, as well as eventually back to school to get a Master’s Degree in art therapy for children. I want my work and my purpose in life to be helping others and bettering our society as a whole. I think effective communication is a good way to do that,  whether it be communicating important messages through my design work or helping kids (and even adults) express their emotions visually when words are hard.

As for my personal life, I grew up in a small town next to the Columbia River.  Some of my hobbies include hiking, cooking, and gardening. I can also be caught enjoying a good horror movie and am a sucker for a sci-fi novel. That’s probably all you need to know about me for now. Thanks for reading!