Chipotle's 'A Love Story' crams a masterclass in brand evolution into its four minutes.
A Love Story is a delightful short from Chipotle, telling the story of Evie and her lemonade stand, and Ivan and his orange juice stall, and how their competition increases over the years and eventually gets completely out of control.
Directed by Saschka Unseld, who you might know from Pixar's The Blue Umbrella, it's a lovely little animation, but what's particularly impressive about it is how it crams 40 years of fictional brand development into four minutes.
How A Love Story's brands evolve over the years
That's the work of Italian designer and illustrator Davide Saraceno. He was given the massive task of designing not one, but three fictional brands for A Love Story. The two main brands – Lemon Land and Mister Orange, had to evolve from around the 1960s to the present day, reflecting both the growth of the businesses and the prevalent design styles and clichés of the time.
Eventually Evie and Ivan get together and launch their own brand
As the companies become bigger and more successful, their brands become increasingly fake and impersonal, until a climactic realisation that forces Evie and Ivan to get together and launch a new brand: Evie and Ivan's, representing a genuine and sustainable business.
Davide had to create plenty of background details and props
And if the branding and logo design wasn't enough, Davide also had to create mascots, posters, packaging design and more for the three companies, as well as loads of other minor details and props to flesh out the rest of the animation.
An object lesson in mascots evolving out of control
In all, it's a mammoth undertaking with spectacular results, and Davide has generously shared a whole stack of his designs - many of them created with art director Katy Wu. To see the entire brand evolution, head over to Davide's page on Behance.
Jim McCauley is a writer, performer and cat-wrangler who started writing professionally way back in 1995 on PC Format magazine, and has been covering technology-related subjects ever since, whether it's hardware, software or videogames. A chance call in 2005 led to Jim taking charge of Computer Arts' website and developing an interest in the world of graphic design, and eventually led to a move over to the freshly-launched Creative Bloq in 2012. Jim now works as a freelance writer for sites including Creative Bloq, T3 and PetsRadar, specialising in design, technology, wellness and cats, while doing the occasional pantomime and street performance in Bath and designing posters for a local drama group on the side.
