Thursday, October 22, 2009

Teasing ad

There's a teaser ad out now for a new Android-operating-system-based-phone. The new phone is the Verizon Droid. The ad's slogan "Droid does" features a mix of upper- and lowercase letters that is difficult to parse. The lowercase "r" in particular doesn't make sense in this context. But the lowercase "r" is the star letter, so that has to stay.



So, I fixed the "d" letters. Left the "e."



But that's maybe a little too much, so I just fixed one "d" and left the rest. I think this is a huge legibility improvement. And the cute little eyes or fangs or whatever under the "r" are left intact.

6 comments:

Mark Simonson said...

Hm. I don't find any of them hard to read, but the ones with the lowercase "d" might be slightly easier just because they are less monotonous. I think the monotonous shapes do made it look more droid-ish, though.

David Steinlicht said...

You're right, Mark. I guess legibility doesn't really apply when one is talking about nine letters.

Still, the uppercase "D" and "O" in this design are so very close.

Monotonous on purpose? I'm going to have to think about that. Maybe the monotony is built in to make the special "r" stand out more? M-m-m-okay.

Steven Stwalley said...

They should have run this by legal... Lucas has the trademark on the word "droid."

sunshinegrl75 said...

Since Lucas has the trademark, maybe that is why they made the "r" different. For them it may be like the backward "R" in Toys R Us.

David Steinlicht said...

Not to worry -- at the bottom of a Verizon Droid page is this fine print:

"DROID is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. and its related companies. Used under license."

Lawsuit averted.

Anonymous said...

The unter-umlaut "r" I think is supposed
to stand for robot eyeballs in the little
android figure that goes with the marketing, maybe.

But it could be the start of a new
ideogram-alphabet symbiosis, the addition of Chinese type character radicals with little ticks and tacks representing different meanings? I am hoping that
Google will change the very alphabet.