Local Rebranding…

It seems NYC's most well known pharmacy is going through a bit of an identity crisis. Some of the city's Duane Reade locations have started rolling out this new logo and type treatment - though most of them are still clinging to the good old blue and red.

Personally, I'm not a fan of either treatment - the old one just looks kind of cheap and generic and the new one looks... like a cheap and generic place trying to be upscale. Dude, it's Duane Reade. Not exactly the epitome of high end we're talking about here. The black and white is a bit dramatic, no? I think the type treatment beneath the new mark works nicely, but the mark itself looks like something that would have been good if the person who designed it didn't suck.

The old logo, as generic as it was/is, at least has some sort of uniformity and flow to the design. It makes sense and at least appears to be well thought out. The alignment on it is perfectly constructed - the top of the D curves into the R, the vertical width of the horizontal bar in the R is perfectly matched to the empty white space created negative space where the letters don't quite merge. There's a rhyme and reason to this design. It makes sense and it worked. I would see it and immediately know that there was a Duane Reade up ahead and I could stop in and pick up whatever miscellaneous thing I needed.

The new logo, for all it's upscale wannabe dramatics, looks extremely sloppy, when you get right down to it. The circle/D/R overlap is poorly executed, as is the connection of the two letters. The type beneath it would look okay, though since they used an uppercase R in the actual mark, it looks like the two don't really mesh. Where it should flow together as a whole, there's an oddness created by the serifs on the R and the empty space around the D curve.

As a whole, the effort looks very slap-dash. Like the designer thought... whatever, it's just Duane Reade... which is pretty much what I said a few paragraphs back, but I wasn't the one being paid to do the job. I guess it doesn't really matter. I don't really go to DR to admire their awesome design skillz... usually it's just cause I need some toilet paper or something, but still. It's going to take some getting used to when this one rolls out all over and the usual blue and red are gone.