This week restaurant chain Denny's squeezed out a brand new mascot for their nationwide marketing campaign. Let's take a look at it, shall we?
Oh dear. Yup, that's a turd wearing a fedora. A turd that was apparently designed by Aardman Studios.
OK, I think it's supposed to be a breakfast sausage and not a hunk of walking, talking fecal matter. I guess that might be OK if that was the only thing on Denny's menu. Since they offer a variety of food, sausage isn't the first thing that springs to mind when I see this thing, and it ends up looking like a nice, healthy dump. Definitely not something you want to see when you're trying to eat in a restaurant.
Once again I have to ask— how the hell does something like this make it to print and into stores? If Denny's is anything like where I work, then this design had to go through dozens and dozens of people for approval. I cannot believe that not a single one of them looked at this thing and said, "Wait a minute... that's not a sausage, that's a turd!" Someone was definitely asleep at the wheel in the corporate headquarters.
Even if it didn't look like a sentient bowel movement, it's still a terrible design. Adding a cartoony face and limbs to a product is one of the most hackneyed and unoriginal graphic design concepts possible— one that was old and worn out back in the Speedy Alka-Seltzer days. No self respecting graphic designer would ever create such a thing, especially here in the 21st Century.
In fact back when I was in art school, I had a professor who actually kicked a student out of his class for creating a mascot very similar to this one!
On the other hand, I supposed Saucy The Breakfast Sausage here was better than Denny's original mascot idea— Scuttles The Kitchen Cockroach.
