DAY 0
October 4, 2010
GAP introduces its new logo on its site. No fuss, no fanfare, no event, just done.
Down With Design Blog reports the new logo is no good: “I really can’t understand the thinking behind this move.” In no time designers express their discontent on the bad design. Some even offer GAP a free redesign of their logo.
October 6, 2010
Kitsune Noir Blog reports: “There was a lot of brand equity in that big blue square and they didn’t move far away enough from the source for this logo to even begin to feel new or exciting.” Twitter explodes and someone (is it GAP?) starts a Twitter to defend the change: http://twitter.com/GapLogo. Gap gets a ro and contra Twitter. The internet community starts talking about Gapocalypse.
October 7, 2010
The logo gets the official name of ‘monstrosity’. GAP states/pretends the new logo is just a way to create buzz for their crowdsourcing project to find a new logo. Their Facebook page says:
“We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to... see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.”
GAP is crowdsourcing for a new logo? No way. It’s just a bad PR recovery attempt the online community reacts. Since they want the world to create their new logo, where is the design brief?
Only the Time-NewsFeed seems to like the new logo. “NewsFeed personally does not mind Helvetica, and so this new logo brings to mind visions of a streamlined, technologically dominant future America where everyone wears white suits and cool glasses. Sure, it's generic, but don't you know that in the future everything looks alike?"
October 8, 2010
It takes GAP 2 days to react. Marka Hansen, President of GAP North America reacts in a column in the Huffington Post.
She states: “Our brand and our clothes are changing and rethinking our logo is part of aligning with that. We want our customers to take notice of Gap and see what it stands for today. We chose this design as it's more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward.”
She invites everyone to go into the dialogue and through their Facebook page people can send new proposals. How can she be defending a bad logo and at the same time invite people to make other proposals? One of the reactions says: “it (the logo) looks like something from a corporate powerpoint presentation”.
October 11, 2010
The GAP Facebook page end the story:
“Ok. We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers. So instead of crowd sourcing, we’re bringing back the Blue Box tonight. “
Bye bye new logo, bye bye crowdsourcing, helo old logo.
Marka Hansen’s full statement:
"Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, we’ve seen an outpouring of comments from customers and the online community in support of the iconic blue box logo.
Last week, we moved to address the feedback and began exploring how we could tap into all of the passion. Ultimately, we’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand. All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we’ve made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further.
At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels.
In the meantime, the website will go back to our iconic blue box logo and, for Holiday, we’ll turn our blue box red for our seasonal campaign.
We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community. This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing.
There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way."
Hell yea... I hope so.
DAY 7 - the new logo on the site is the old one.
PS: For the occasion the blog is posted in Helvetica ;-)
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