Orange Juice

You may have noticed, assuming you buy orange juice and pay attention to such matters, that Tropicana has adopted a new package design. It was introduced this past October (though it began appearing on store shelves only at the beginning of this year), and it almost immediately drew the ire of, well, of people who pay attention to such matters.

(I work in Graphic Design, so of course this is of interest to me — I can't speak for anyone else.)

In most cases, a controversy of this sort might begin and end within that small community of people who pay attention to such matters, and that would be that. (It's a great big, cluttered world of substandard design out there, yet life somehow goes on, despite all.) But Tropicana has received so much criticism of the new package design that they've decided to abandon it, and go back to using the previous version.

I thought the new package design was just fine (though some of that criticism was warranted), and the decision to abandon it so quickly seems premature to me, an overreaction. But what strikes me as most fascinating about this is that people are complaining about the packaging — not the product, or the way it tastes, or what it contains, or how it's difficult to use, but just the appearance of the container the product is sold in. I can't recall that ever having happened before in mass consumer culture.

I wonder — did this become a cause célèbre among people who wouldn't ordinarily pay attention to package design? Or was it just one of those occasions where an Internet meme burned bright enough and hot enough to attract notice?