Gap Falls Into Logo Trap
October 12, 2010
Whether it was genuine backtracking or an elaborate P.R. ruse, we may never know. But Gap has quickly junked its new logo after what it calls an “outpouring of comments from customers and the online community in support of the iconic blue box logo.” Cliff Kuang at Fast Company design blog has tracked the logo flap from the start. (Fast Company also brought attention to Tropicana’s bad orange juice carton design, which The Hot Sheet noted at the time.) He says, “You gotta wonder: Are rebrandings — whether bold and visionary or downright terrible — impossible in the age of Twitter and Facebook? Will companies know when an outcry isn’t pointing to a terrible design, but rather just people refusing to embrace change?” But you also gotta wonder whether some of the outrage came from designers sore about how Gap commissioned the new logo. The company used the reviled “crowd-sourcing” method, in which designs are solicited at large… for free. No member of the design community – hurting for work like everyone else these days – would appreciate a logo created that way. Such practices drive down artists’ fees even further, especially when pursued by major corporations.
1 Comment:
Starr wrote:
Yes…this definitely had the design-community up in arms. The new logo was about generic as can be. Supposedly a New York agency called Laird & Partners designed it, but this fact raised eyebrows. Could an agency really design something s…o lame? AND have Gap actually approve it? It smelled like a PR stunt from the get-go. And now that they’ve reverted back to their old logo, it’s almost certain that this whole thing was done to get Gap in the news. And to remind people just how much they like the Gap just the way it is. The funniest thing to come out of it is this: http://www.craplogo.me/
Pretty funny.
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