Updating the brand?

Starbucks fiddles with its graphics:

...With more than $24 billion in revenue, 31,000 locations worldwide, and countless promotions and menu items that vary regionally, keeping the brand operating at scale is a major job. 

But for the past year, Starbucks’s internal creative team has been updating the brand system that makes up everything from its in-store signage to its promotions on Instagram. And now, it’s published the brand’s full guidelines—complete with color codes and typographic weights—onto a public website for anyone to explore.

“We were just proud of the work, and inspired by other brands being more transparent about their creative process,” says Ben Nelson, creative director at Starbucks...

Extra! Extra! Starbucks Will Stop Selling Newspapers

Rob's comment:
I don't give a shit about Starbucks' graphics or its "creative process," but I like to buy the NY Times at Starbucks when I'm out of town. Hard to see how stopping the NY Times is going to help the brand. 

Besides, few of the out of town locations carry many copies. It's not a big money deal for anyone. Apparently the Old Farts who read demographic isn't big enough to make a difference to the bean counters at Starbucks.

The both-sides-do-it bullshit

From Driftglass:

Once upon a time Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times was Mr. David Brooks of The (now defunct) Weekly Standard where he specialized in the "Liberals are idiots/Conservatives are brilliant" genre. 

In fact, it's no exaggeration that Mr. Brooks' effusive praise of George W. Bush...

Competent Conservatives, Reactionary Liberals

by David Brooks

January 15, 2001

We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days when Norman Lear still had hair...

...and his unremitting support of the Iraq War were what landed him a job-for-life at The New York Times.

Then, when the Bush Administration imploded in exactly the way David Brooks swore it never would, Brooks and every other Bush enabler in the media had a sudden and urgent need to find something else to write about. 

An entirely new genre was called for: one in which Conservative hacks like David Brooks had never actually been wrong, and the cherished tradition of punching Liberals---who had been right about the Right all along---was still honored.

Thus did Both Siderism became the official state religion of the Beltway media. And, with very few exceptions, cranking out twice-weekly columns blaming Both Sides has literally been the only thing David Brooks has done at The New York Times for the past 15 years.

As I have written about ad nauseum, making Both Siderism the official state religion of the Beltway has been a disaster for our democracy. It effectively killed honest mainstream political journalism and made the rise of Republican monsters like McConnell and Trump inevitable. 

However one small salutary side-effect of virtually every fucking David Brooks column being the same as every other David Brooks column is that it makes the odious job of reading David Brooks columns much easier...