Posts tagged typography

Y Phone U?

Y Phone U? Driving down the bridge from downtown Cairo to Heliopolis, I noticed a massive billboard that seemed to ask “Y Phone U?” Before I could really properly decipher it, it had passed, but I did remember getting a glance of the HTC logo at the bottom, which was all the info I needed to do some online research on this obviously retarded campaign. It quickly became apparent that the designers behind this campaign were attempting to formulate the word YOU using HTC’s phone as the letter O. Thing is, no one really looks at these HTC phones and thinks “hm, this phone really looks like an O,” so how these designers figured placing the phone between the letter Y and U will instantly translate to the word “YOU”, I have no freaking clue. Not that I’ve never seen an O shaped like a rounded rectangle before. A couple typefaces off the top of my very absent head are Eurostile and ModeNine for example. Oh waitaminute, if these are the typefaces that already have rounded rectangles for O’s in their alphabet, then maybe if I use their Y’s and U’s to form the word “YOU” it will actually look like the word “YOU” and not make the unfortunate soul passing by the billboard feel like shit for being asked “Y Phone U?” instead. I mean really, I’m not asking them to develop a whole new typeface for this campaign… even though that’s actually what they did. No sorry, they developed several YOU’s, all of which, do not match the shape of the HTC phone. Seriously, not one freakin’ typeface that can make the phone look like a O? Not even by accident? Did designers even work on this campaign at all? Also, when was the last time you were reading something and the center of the letter O was crammed with clouds, a calendar, and over six little icons? If you really want the phone to even remotely look like the letter O, then turn it the fuck off, and then take a picture of it. Don’t include enough icons and menus to distract me from the metaphor that is the concept of your freaking campaign. And trust me, HTC, no phone with a default desktop background that hurts the eyes will ever “get me.” Or my money.