In a week, I set aside an hour to do what can best be described as “General fooling around with Photoshop”. I have this hobby for distorting popular logos. I am told it’s called Visual Punning. Here are some of the slightly crude outputs of this habit.
The idea is to embed a story/event/experience inside the logo.
For my non-Indian readers,
1. In 2003, Cadbury, an Indian chocolate manufacturer decided that Indian kids were seriously protein deprived and chose to surprise all of us by packing in some wriggly protein rich surprises into their chocolates.
2. In 2007, a group of Shiv Sainiks decided that Orkut was Orbad and things took an Orugly turn when they started vandalizing cybercafes that let customers access that paragon of clean, homely, safe and spamless social networking. I wrote about it a while back here and here
3 . The 5th edition of an operating system that was, to quote, a 32 bit extension and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can’t stand 1 bit of competition, was released to much fanfare in a country that had the perfect metaphor for it. Kumbhakarna. The immensely strong brother of Ravana, who unfortunately slept most of the time. In fact, if one were to stretch this metaphor more than it honestly should be stretched…Ravanasoft tried very hard to unleash the power of Vistakarna, but the lumbering giant’s slothfulness persisted. Perhaps kidnapping the MacOSita from Stevorama in the 80s was not such a good idea after all. The whole landscape was getting more and more hostile, what with his brother Googlakshman and new and powerful weapons such as Ipodastra.
4. In 2004, the makers of partially edible industrial solvents, Pepsi and Coke, got into a spot of bother with several allegations over the presence of pesticides in their drinks. I am told that the internal technical name for their drinks were Dipepsi Dispriteo Trichloro7up. They managed to get themselves cleared of most charges (primarily by arguing that water purity standards in India were ambiguous) but the jokes still continue.
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