Graphic Design Complaint

Yesterday I visited my storage unit for the first time in weeks.  Mostly I did it because I have my reserve cum towel in there.  I washed it quickly while my parents were out visiting the grave of Father's mother/my biological grandmother, but because it was the only thing in the washer, it stalled out, so it didn't go through the drying cycle, and so I had a damp as fuck towel that I tried hanging it everywhere outside for a few hours in a vain attempt to get all the water wringed out of it before I had to throw it into my unit, and when I did it was still damp as fuck.  It was crusty when I saw it, and it may have raised the humidity level of my unit, but it's OK.  Don't know how my dick will feel when I dragged it across the towel in order to dab away the cum still sitting in my dickhole.

Anyway, I also went to my storage unit to get through all of the papers that are still in there.  My vow of chugging through my stuff isn't going well.  The pile of shit I have in there is taller than I am, and I really, really am running out of room.  Still, I have neither the time nor the inclination to sit there and go through all my stuff to see what I really want to keep and what I can throw away.  And I could alleviate my unit's space (and go through and maybe rearrange what I have in there) if I could bring some of the bags home with me, but I can't do that until my parents leave.

I've tried to start anywhere with my stuff, have any sort of entrée into which I can, in a focused, organized fashion, sift through my things.  My entry point is something I had not realized I had inadvertently collected: Brochures from car companies I get during my annual trip to the Twin Cities Auto Show.  I usually get dozens from all the brands whose vehicles I look at and get in, and I put them in a good, solid, reusable bag (usually it's Toyota), and when I leave a few hours later I vow to sit down and go through them and just fantasize about getting a new car.

I never go back, of course.  What I do is throw them into my closet and say I will look through them another time.  I have brochures going back years.  There are other small gifts that I found alongside the pamphlets, completely forgetting that I really wanted when I saw them on the Auto Show floor.  One time I even got a can of an energy drink branded by one of the car companies.  I threw it in the bag and completely forgot it.  I had moved a few year's worth of Auto Show bags from my closet to my storage unit a few years ago.  When I finally opened up the year and bag with the energy drink can, it had leaked, all of the drink had evaporated, and pretty much all the pamphlets in the same bag were rotted.  Whoops!

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Oh, wait -- that's not what I want to talk about.  I have, in my very slow way, started to go through the Auto Show bags.  And when you read them -- and I mean look at everything such as the copy and the features and the graphic design and the font -- you kind of notice how weird these brochures get just for the sake of getting you to buy a car.  There are, for example, a lot of voluminous yet empty slogans that are intended to excite you into think their cars are exciting cars, and you'll look so badass driving through a curvy desert road -- and you'll do it driving stick, because automatic is for pussies.  I've taken a few photos of these dumb aphorisms for posterity's sake, then taken those pamphlets home to put them in the recycling bin.

And yet when I went yesterday, something else caught my eye.  I was going through the bag for the 2019 Twin Cities Auto Show.  I apparently went to the Fiat part of the show because I have its small, almost-square brochure.  The cover has the Fiat badge and a series of multi-colored blobs that interconnect on the cover.  Think Tetris, but not all the pieces consist of four squares, and there are a lot of holes inbetween them so that's why they don't disappear.

Then I open it up.  It's a basic, straightforward car pamphlet.  It has an introduction about how the car company has been around for decades, it has an illustrious history, and that history points the way to an exciting, successful future, blah-blah-blah.  They then go through the whole lineup of their cars, each with its own hyped-up introduction, followed by a page of specifications for the trims of each model -- this trim has electronic stability control standard, a back-up camera is only optional in this trim, etc.

My problem: The multi-colored blobs on the cover page, save for three whole red circles and one hollow red half-circle on the third page, are nowhere to be found.  In fact, there are no graphic cues to call back to the mod-looking cover.  You can't put one blob for each of the models you're showcasing on your pamphlet, Fiat?  Then why did you pick that design for your cover?  It seriously looks like the cover from a different car company was stapled onto Fiat's pamphlet.  (I should add a photo of the cover of the 2019 Fiat brochure, but I don't know how to upload it onto Blogger.)

I don't know why this bothers me so much.  But it was so striking the dissonance between the visual expectation the cover art teases you with and the normal, even boring graphic identity of the rest of the pamphlet that I felt compelled to complain about it here.  Plus, in the absence of having much else to say on Memorial Weekend 2021, it was nice to blog post about something I have never blog posted about before.