Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

Posts like this seem like the designer equivalent of the music labels spending years complaining about how sharing music is wrong and trying to put the "evil" back in Pandora's box, while millions of people merrily continue to download music off bittorrent anyway. The reality of the internet is that people can easily solicit work on spec from thousands of designers, and they will get good stuff in return. Will it be great? Rarely. But it'll be good enough for most, and if it's not, they're out nothing. See 99designs.com.<p>This seems like classic game theory. While it's in the design industry's collective best interest to never work on spec like this, it might be in an individual designer's best interest to design Gap's logo for free. And even if it's not, if most of them think it is, you've still lost. Believe me, I understand that Gap's move here is a slap in the face, but many designers out there will do it anyway, just for the chance to say they designed Gap's logo.

<i>I researched your customers. Talked to a variety of them, in fact. Asked them not only about The Gap, but about their own lives. Their needs. Anxieties. Their thoughts on the future. I took all that into account.<p>I also interviewed employees in a few of your stores. (They’re quite dedicated, you know.) I asked them how they felt about the company and about their interactions with customers. Because customer service may actually be the most important part of your brand. And the logo’s job is simply to help evoke those pleasant experiences.</i><p>Does anyone else find this pretentious? I somehow doubt that most of the world's biggest brands have logos that came about through this process, or at least are measurably different than they would have been if a talented designer came up with something that felt right and looked good.<p><a href="http://www.murdercapers.com/corporate/companyLogos/CompanyLogosNew.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.murdercapers.com/corporate/companyLogos/CompanyLo...</a><p>I bet a lot of those are just variations on the original logo of the company when it was started. Maybe I'm completely wrong though; just seems like if you'd expect <i>anyone</i> to think that designing a new logo should include hundreds of hours and dozens or hundreds of customer and marketing surveys, it would be a branding firm who wants to charge you for all that. I'm not sure anyone else would be able to tell the difference between a logo that came from that process and one that came from a few hours of a great designer throwing out ideas.

So let me get this straight: Gap first <i>hires</i> someone to design a logo, and it's universally panned by the design community. They then ask the community "if our new logo is so crappy, why not see if you can do better?" Then, the design community bitches at Gap for not hiring someone to design their logo? Does this seem a bit odd to anybody else?<p>Also, it's hard to bitch when your whole career depends on something as subjective as logo design. Because of this subjectivity it's possible a design rookie out of high school could design something as cool or cooler than the seasoned professionals, and do it for a <i>fraction</i> of the price (or free). Conversely, that same subjectivity allows people to get away with charging outrageous fees for design work (i.e. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#cite_ref-rand_16-0" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#cite_ref-rand_16-0</a>)<p>It seems to me like Gap is damned no matter what they do.

A bit of background on this. Gap just updated their logo, its getting pretty heavily slammed by the design community (I too think its god awful)<p>More here: <a href="http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2010/october/new-gap-logo" rel="nofollow">http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2010/october/new-gap...</a><p>BTW the author's twitter feed, @Mike_FTW is one of the funnier feeds to follow.

<i>I’ve redesigned your logo. It’s behind the post-it above. It’s unbelievably good. Fantastic, even. I’m convinced it’s what you need.</i><p>aaaaaaand it turns out to be crap. Your policy of 3 (or whatever) "redesigns" turns out to give me 3 more crap designs and then, according to the contract, I have to pay you anyway. I spent $5,000 like that. Never again.

So, what i think is missing is this link that explains exactly what this dude is writing about:<p><pre><code> Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. 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. [1] </code></pre> So, in this context, i think the rant makes a bit more sense. Equally funny is iso50's description of this as "a tropicana,"[2] which is a zing i never thought i'd hear.<p>But, i want to throw out there that this impulse to violently reject or passionately protect logos has an analog in language. "All living languages are always changing"[3] and same goes for logos and brand identities. Much like language or fashion, logos evolve and whatever.<p>And for everyone that's all "oh that's shite, i could do better," I invite you to really try your hand at this sort of thing with actual real life constraints and (gasp!) real life clients. There's all sorts of design work you can do without a client, but it takes a special type to actually, you know, design <i>for</i> somebody else and more hopefully, design <i>with</i> someone else.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/gap/posts/159977040694165" rel="nofollow">http://www.facebook.com/gap/posts/159977040694165</a> [2]: <a href="http://blog.iso50.com/2010/10/06/gap-redesign-contest/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.iso50.com/2010/10/06/gap-redesign-contest/</a> [3]: <a href="http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-fields-change.cfm" rel="nofollow">http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-fields-change.cfm</a><p><i>edit</i> formatting goofs always get me

Before I realized what this post really was, I tried to peel off the post-it note with my mouse. Now <i>that's</i> an entry that would have gotten some attention.

Call me cynical but a very similar play happened with Kraft and their launch of a new Vegemite+cheese spread.<p>They named it "iSnack 2.0", were met with strong derision, opened up a naming contest, and finally settled with the consumer-selected "Cheesybite". This whole rigmarole earned them quite a bit of publicity. People were even buying-up the iSnack-labeled jars before the renaming thinking they'd become collector's items.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegemite#Vegemite_Cheesybite:_new_recipe" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegemite#Vegemite_Cheesybite:_n...</a><p>"iSnack 2.0" and the new Gap logo are too terrible to happen innocently.

99designs entries: <a href="http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/design-better-gap-logo-community-project-54693" rel="nofollow">http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/design-better-gap-...</a>

I'm not a design genius-- but when I saw Gap's new logo I think I knew what they were going for, and imho I doubt it was created haphazardly. The new logo is exemplary of the transition of "best practice" design principles from print to electronic media.<p>They unabashedly violated two rules of logo and print media design, and it's so blatant that I can't believe it was an accident. Their logo features a gradient (print-media epic fail), and two low-contrast overlapping colors, the P and the background square (also a print-media epic fail).<p>I hope that the executives do not knee-jerk a reaction and demand a logo redesign, but instead play out the campaign and see how it pans out. I'm not convinced it was a mistake.<p>Perhaps the real redesign wasn't the logo, but their website and online presence?

I should have provided some context since this isn't exactly the usual HN subject matter.<p>Earlier this week, Gap Clothing changed their logo from the old iconic blue box logo to the new one which is essentially another Helvetica wordmark and a box placed in the corner. Mike's post (the main link), which is employing quite a bit of insincerity, assumes you knew about this before hand.<p>Brand New, a great brand identity blog, has more and a lively discussion about it - <a href="http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/dont_mind_the_gap_or_the_square.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/dont_min...</a>

Whole post is silly and pretentious. If the design really <i>is</i> so great that Gap thinks it's worth using, then legally they'll have to pay him to transfer the copyright before they can do anything with it.<p>So cut out the stupid ego-drenched drama and just show the logo. He'll get a lot farther that way than demanding compensation up front anyway. Even if Gap rejects the logo, it will stand as a nice portfolio/concept piece if it is really good as guy claims.

Simple response:<p>The value of a product is set by the consumer, not by the producer. (This is true for over-inflated values as well, so don't bitch.)<p>If the value set is too low for the producer, he either has an inflated sense of worth, or isn't doing a good enough job of educating the consumer, or both.

Many clever alternate designs (and parodies) have been posted on the ISO150 blog:<p><pre><code> http://blog.iso50.com/2010/10/06/gap-redesign-contest/</code></pre>

I hope I'm not the only one who added style="visibility:hidden;" to the post-it-note image hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

Posts like this misunderstand how decisions about corporate logos are made. You need to back-stab the ad agency and cozy up to the marketing VP to change the logo.<p>Posting like this on the web just invites the marketing VP and the account rep to go out to dinner and laugh at your feeble attempts, over a couple of stiff drinks.<p>It really is exactly like Mad Men.

A lot of the comments in this thread seem to imply that brand specialists will always deliver a quality logo. I can think of one recent example where that wasn't the case: the London 2010 Olympics logo. It cost £400,000 and was negatively received by the public and many industry professionals:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Logo" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Logo</a>

This was the first thought I had when I saw their "if you can do better" press release.<p>Kind of depressing from such a large brand, to be honest. As if it wasn't bad enough getting this kind of "Well it's just a design, it takes like five minutes, I can sketch one up right now! So here, you can do it, but we're giving you peanuts" mentality from smaller clients.

Brilliant

And now I have a vision of the word "Gap" with fingers pulling at the G and the p.<p>Yes. Blame goatse on me. But once you see it, it never goes away.

Well played. How about a sneak peak?

The new logo is horrendous.