Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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The Pepsi vs Coke Logo Challenge (Revised)

This is sort of a good counterpoint to my everyone gets a fair shot post, explaining how the blog world can get out of control on one side of an issue. Anyway, a few weeks ago you may have seen a chart depicting the logo history of Pepsi vs Coke (I posted it over at Tumblr in July). Well, the branding blog Brand New is disputing the accuracy of the timeline and it’s a pretty good argument:

Missing from the chart in the Coca-Cola evolution is the penchant for Coca-Cola to use the shape of its bottle as an icon, acting on and off as the logo or complementary logo or subsidized logo of the main script logo, sometimes to a confusing fault. Today’s Coca-Cola logo is, of course, amazingly similar to what it was 124 years ago but it’s not quite fair to idolize them for a flawless consistency that they haven’t actually earned.

So yeah, sometimes it’s good for there to be two sides to a story.

August 5, 2009