today’s edition of “who the hell designed this”?
Ladies and gentlemen (mostly ladies), I give you Yaz. It’s the birth control pill with the worst marketing design—and you know I can’t resist ending the sentence like this—ever conceived.
I want to meet the genius who pitched the marketing campaign for this product. His charisma has got to fall somewhere between Kennedy and Jim Jones, because based purely on the visuals, there’s no way a non-blind, non-insane board of directors looked at the presentation and said, “Yes. Of all the possible sounds and colors in the universe that we could have combined, these are the ones we want.”
Where do I begin? The name? “Yaz” sounds like the kind of thing you’d say if you lived in the 80s and had just made a big mistake. “I just yazzed the details on this report. What was I thinking with this haircut? Yaz! Oh man, I just yazzed the doorjam on this new paint job. I knew I should’ve used tape.” I’m sure “expletive I’d use after doing something stupid” is exactly the association that a menstrual pill wants to evoke.
Then there’s the color scheme: orange on green. Clearly, this was designed by rodeo clowns. Were they looking for colors that would electrify a woman’s ovaries? Is that what women want? A birth control solution that will induce a grand mal seizure of progestin? Colors so bright and discordant that they will blast the acne clean off your face? Do women want EXTREME birth control? Since Yaz is already stealing Gatorade‘s colors, they might as well go the extra inch and just use the lightning bolt as well.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Yaz comes from Europe, a No Man’s Land where up is down and they drive on the left. C’est la vie.
Actually, I have seen orange and green work… just not those particular shades. And only in very limited applications. Speaking of shades of green that don’t work, today I saw a wall painted the most random shade of green in the new LA County/USC hospital currently under construction. It was much too saturated for toothpaste, and much too blue for key lime pie. It was just… a complete failure of a color.