Many have a love-hate relationship with Starbucks (gives me coffee / corporately “edgy”), but the holiday design it’s come up with this season inspires something we don’t often equate with the ubiquitous coffee chain: sympathy.
Starting Nov. 13, Starbucks will sell a line of tote bags, coffee cups and gift cards that does away with snowflakes and Christmas trees in favor of a sort of brown, green, silver and yellow hodge-podge of pixels more likely to bring about blindness than holiday cheer.
The designs, likely doodled on a Starbucks lid by fashion brand Rodarte (beloved by the likes of Kirsten Dunst and Kristen Stewart), have been praised as “new-aesthetic” branding by some, but really?
“You’ve got this pixelation of grays, whites and silver that’s modern and digitized,” Samie Barr, Starbucks’ vice president of category brand management, told FastCoDesign.com optimistically.
And hence the sympathy when we start wondering if the Fifth Avenue design world has somehow managed to convince Starbucks that bitmapping is “modern.”
What do YOU think of this design?
