Cheapy, tacky, ordinary.
Some of the adjectives used by Gap customers to describe its now-axed logo. After less than one week, it has been consigned to the graveyard inhabited by rejected arrows, squiggles and inadvertently offensive corporate emblems.
“new logo creates a gap between company and its customers”
Consumer-driven design works for some products, but not for corporate branding. It was a horrible idea to go to the general public for a design contest in the first place. The move from the automatically identifiable and universally recognizable GAP logo to the run-of-the-mill financial/techy gradated blue box and sans serif type is awful. They could almost be two different companies, one a fashion company, the other a financial institution or software company. One says “familiar” the other says there’s a “gap” between you and us.
The separation between the name and the blue box says it all. If the text represents the company and the blue box represents the customers, the one on the left shows unity of purpose while the one on the right says we’re bigger/better/more important than you. GAP in all caps stands for something else and removes the connotation between the meaning of the word and the company name. Title caps Gap says exactly that, leaving the Webster’s Dictionary definition in tact.
It was a horrible idea to go to the general public for a design contest in the first place.
According to BrandNew, the logo was created by Laird and Partners, not through crowd sourcing. That Laird is a veteran and has successfully worked with GAP for a long time makes this situation even more surprising.
The idea to enlist the public was a shot from the hip if you will launched as a respons to the overwhelmingly negative reception of the new logo.
Now all is back to normal and we know it was all just a bad dream.
Thanks for the clarification. Like you said, this info makes it even more surprising. And more of a design crime.
I was going off of this article:
It looks like this was open to individuals and designers/design teams.
Yea I think they really muddled it up by trying to cover for the crap logo. They ddin’t do any sort of crowdsourcing until people started saying negative things. Then they suddenly said that the logo was just a test and they’re looking for community contributions.
Corporate failure. The article on FastCo gave some good insight into this event. It pretty much will scare any large corporation from launching a rebrand anytime in the near future, and has ruined Gap’s short term image.
The new logo looked cheap. Glad to see them go back. Reminds me of the new Coke fiasco in the eighties.
Corporate failure? How much free publicity did the Gap get over the past few weeks. First for a new logo, now for going back to the old logo. Like most, I thought the new logo was horrible, but in the end this might all be a good thing for The Gap.
Maybe gap saw all the press about the tropicana debacle and figured it was a smart, cheap media buy? Stranger things have happened.
R
I was thinking the exact same thing. I certainly haven’t thought about gap in over 5 years, so if trying to stir up the waters to get back into peoples heads was the goal, it worked. Could this be some new advanced level marketing tactic? It seems to be happening more and more now. And with the exposure that design has and businesses knowing how important it is, it would seem strange that companies would do something like this by accident.
Basically, just like the Tropicana fiasco, it got free press from the internet for a product that in the end is still the same. It seems like a risky move to try to refresh themselves in peoples minds but it can work. Right now Gap has the same logo as always but is in a lot more peoples heads than it was before. It will be interesting to see if their business does better after this.
Anyone have Tropicana sales numbers before, during and after the fiasco? Business is only motivated by money.
I felt all “conspiracy theorist” for thinking that it was intentional myself. After going to the site of the designers that allegedly designed the new mark, I just couldn’t believe they would have done something that bad on accident.
So here’s a question, what does it take for you (your firm) to go along with taking the fall for something like that for a media stunt? That’s where this is still tripping me up, integrity much?
brilliant!
Isn’t this every designers worst nightmare ?
You work for hours in an “it’s great” bubble… stay up late, tweak after tweak… yeah, that looks awesome.
Then in the cold light of day you look at it and think “my god what was I thinking?!?!?”
Only, no one told the designer what he should have been told or what he should have told himself.
My first thought was “wow, someone’s been watching too much Helvetica” (the movie, not just staring at the typeface)
So this should be up for grabs. Go for it! (sorry, i just had to)
hahaha, genius!
I don’t get it… why rebrand when their logo is them. The logo is GAP!
Seems like a change for the sake of change to me.
Some more Font- and Graphic design-drama in big corps 
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1919127,00.html
Even more: Facebook reduces the size of their font to try to keep readers on the site longer (like that’s necessary…)