New Gap Logo Fail
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- neowe0
beautiful, gap should buy this just so they can call it theirs
- "cuz it makes me gag"neowe
- iit looks like it says GAE.. pron. GAYautoflavour
- i see a mirrored g not a pneowe
- No. This is not good. Sorry.dMullins
- Miesfan0
Gap on Disastrous New Logo: "We're Open to Other Ideas"
Do you think this logo redesign is a stunt to attract attention to a company with declining sales? You know the notion that even bad press is good press? Because this logo is so horrendously bad, they could've made it in MS Word for all we know, what if it's a conspiracy? If that's the issue, touche Gap, touche.
Bill Chandler, vice president of corporate communications, tells Co. that Gap's new logo could be thought of as a jumping-off point for something more permanent. And no, this isn't all a PR stunt.
A new logo for Gap that debuted to much criticism Wednesday might not be the perfect fit, Bill Chandler, vice president of corporate communications of Gap, tells Co.Design. "We love the design, but we're open to other ideas and we want to move forward with the best logo possible," he says.- Other ideas from who? bitches just paid who knows how much and now they're open to more ideas? WTF?Ambushstudio
- How does a "vice president of corporate communications" get away with saying stuff like "We love the design, but we're open to other ideas and we want to move forward with the best logo possible". There's no way he knows what he's doing.Mr_Right
- chumchut0
the truly best part in all this is @gaplogo and @oldgaplogo on twitter. s/he is genius. i'm *addicted* and thinking of actually registering on that morass...just to send my dying love.
- OSFA0
I like this!
http://weblog.muledesign.com/201…
Dear Gap,
As you requested, 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.
It draws on the deep history of the brand and evokes the simple understated elegance that the world has come to expect from The Gap. But it also reaches forward. It provides hope and just the right amount of desperate desire and anxiety brought on by fear of loneliness that the Twitter demographic wants. (Yes, men in their mid-30’s.)
Why am I so confident this logo is right for you?
Well, for one, I am very good at what I do. And, secondly, I’m a professional. This is my job.
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.
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.
Next I talked to your marketing department. We talked about ‘brand essence,’ sure. But we also reviewed all the practical applications of the logo. Online. Offline. From small print ads, to bus posters, billboards and corporate identity systems. We went over cost projections and risk analysis and forecasted future applications.
Man, that stuff took time. A lot of time actually. And a tremendous amount of effort, as well as expertise. Expertise that came from a combination of training, which I had to pay tuition for, and experience. I’m good at this because I’ve done it a lot. Sure, there’s some natural talent there, but by and large I’ve gotten good at my job the same way every other worker has. By experience, by focused effort and by learning from my mistakes.
Luckily I’ve been able to earn a modest living plying my trade by exchanging my efforts to clients for fair value.
So as much as I’d like to just show you the greatest logo I’ve ever made for anyone (...and trust me, if Paul Rand himself saw it, he would realize he was merely the Pippen to my Jordan.) I’d like to be properly compensated for it. Because I put a lot of time and effort into it. And it’s how I earn my living.
And that time and effort was used to make sure I delivered something that actually met your needs and objectives. You guys have numbers to meet. (I imagine at least a 10% increase to last year’s $14.5B in revenue, and $967M in net income.) And plans for the future based on meeting those numbers. So do I.
And for the sake of full disclosure I should let you know that I’ve also frequently shopped at your stores. You sell good stuff. But never in my experience has any of your employees offered me a free pair of pants because the ones I was wearing looked bad. I wouldn’t expect them to. Their job is to sell me clothes.
My job is to sell design.
I believe we understand each other. I anxiously await your call and look forward to negotiating a fair value for the greatest logo on Earth.
- georgesIII0
very long but a good read
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http://sellsellblog.blogspot.com…
Fifty years ago advertising was incredibly simple.A client would go to see some advertising people.
More often than not, he would be wanting to sell more of his product.
The advertising people would think about who buys the product, who might buy it, and if the people who already buy might be tempted to buy it more often.They'd work out where they could best reach these potential buyers.
And then they'd look for things that might persuade the potential buyer to buy the product.They'd find out as much as they could about the product, and the potential customer, and they'd keep thinking until they thought they might have some persuasive thoughts, or facts, or ideas.
Then they'd work out a way of putting that message across in way that would catch the attention of their potential customer, and communicate it to them in a way that suited the product.If the advertising was successful, the potential customer might actually buy the product.
And if they were happy with the product, they might buy it again some time.
Heck, they might even tell a friend or relative about it.
Over time, if the product met their expectations, they might come to think of it, and the maker of it, as pretty good.
That's how most of the great products and brands we know today were built.It all seems so simplistic, doesn't it?
How the modern advertising professional laughs at the very notion of such a basic and naive approach.
These days advertising is so much more sophisticated.
So much more clever.
Now we have brand marketing.We have brand diagrams, some shaped like onions, others like pyramids.
These things are very sophisticated, because they've been considered long and hard by branding consultants and strategists.
They've been through three rounds of development, including one on an away day in Oxfordshire, with a pub lunch and free teas and coffees.Then we have planning.
An entire whole new clever department was set up. Originally it had the simple and useful task of finding out more about the customer. But now planning is much, much more clever. It watches trends, it theorises about society, it taps into the zeitgeist.And even better than that, it can create presentations that last for whole days on these subjects.
And it can write books, too. When you've spent that long thinking about things quite often you'll have enough things to fill a book. Or go on a speaking tour. Other planners will buy the book and go to see the tour.
This cycle continues until absolutely every planner knows absolutely everything there is to know.
Modern planning takes advertising to a whole new level of sophistication and cleverness.So now the modern advertising person imagines what kind of relationship the customer might have with the product. What emotion they might associate with it.
Oh yes, also now the potential customer has a much more clever name, the target demographic.
How fucking clever is that?And we don't really think of the product as a product anymore, that's simplistic thinking. The brand is what's important. What the brand has to say, what kind of conversation it might have with the target demographic. What emotions it would convey.
This is more sophisticated stuff.When all of that has been decided upon, which of course can sometimes take a year, because of how incredibly clever and sophisticated it is, then it is time to unleash the modern advertising creative.
This sophisticated creature has a computer.
They know what a facebook is.
They have an amazing website called YouTube saved into their bookmarks.
They tweet, and they interact, which is a bit like talking, but without the boring old talking bit.They watch a lot of new and clever techniques on their computers. Very clever things, animations and film techniques, photographic trickery.
They really do have their fingers on the pulse of what is new and sophisticated, and of course, clever.
So what happens next is that the sophisticated message that the planning people have worked out based on the sociological findings, trend-watching, and the brand onion, is made into a piece of communication by the advertising creatives using one of the clever techniques they have decided is appropriate.
The correct use of the latest technique can sometimes win the modern advertising creative a modern advertising award (these are very sought after).
Then, with almost absolute certainty, as a result of using the correct application of brand engineering, planning, social insight, the relevant emotional pulls and cues, and sophisticated creative communication techniques, the target demographic, enthralled by the conversation it is having with the brand, nips into tesco and buys the product.
Modern advertising is a highly evolved, highly sophisticated communication business.
Or is it?
Modern marketing and advertising professionals believe that the business has evolved into a much more sophisticated, more thought through, more professional and smarter business than it was say in the 1960s.But how is it then that 99% of all advertising put in front of us is pretty much absolute shit?
Why do messages fall flat?
Why do they fail to connect with the man-on-the-street?
Why do people find advertising more annoying and less helpful than ever before?
Why does the advertising turn out to be so complicated that it is generally indecipherable, even if someone wanted to decipherable it.
Why, if advertising is so damn clever, is no one any the wiser as to whether a piece of advertising is actually going to work or not?
Why is a company that I know for a fact makes excellent, well engineered, well designed automobiles droning on at me about joy?
Why is a confectionary company trying to promise the very same thing, when all I really want from them is some delicious chocolate made from not-too-bad ingredients?Why, if advertising is now so damn clever, is the stuff produced by modern ad agencies so consistently, terribly bad?
Could it be that advertising, in trying to become cleverer and cleverer, has actually completely forgotten what it is doing? That it has disappeared so far up its own sophisticated posterior that it can't even tell, as it gets even more and more complicated? That all of the systems, theories and approaches developed to make it more sophisticated, are actually the very things that are making it much less smart?
Will the modern, sophisticated version of advertising ever be a match for the simple discipline of smart, talented people in a room coming up with smart ideas to sell products?
The modern advertising business is locked in an irreversible cycle of nonsense.
It's actually incredibly stupid compared to the business fifty years ago.
But it will never realise it.
- BaskerviIle0
I wrote a summary of the events of the last 3 days, lots of links in once place: http://brampersand.blogspot.com/…
- ukit0
Let's say you wanna "crowdsource" a big ecommerce site like amazon.com. A site with dozens of different sections, where you need to consider customer data and business strategy just as much as UX, visual design, development, etc... Plus the whole undertaking is way too big for one person, it's probably suited to a team working over the course of several months.
So how does this work? I guess you could have people compete on 99 Designs and submit individual ideas each tiny step of the way...congratulations the site will be done in year 2050. With zero background on the project everyone will be approaching it on a very superficial level.
Most projects aren't that big in scale but they are somewhere in between a logo design and a huge site...but I'd say most are not going to work for crowdsourcing for the same reasons.
- randommail0
One could say that technically you could crowdsource any design or production work.
But you would see the greatest amount of quality degradation and thus effectiveness in things like TV commercials and websites. (Effectiveness being the key). The quality difference will be less noticeable or at least justifiable in a client's mind with things like logos.
- ukit0
I doubt it. How can you crowdsource an entire site, or an iphone app, or a TV commercial? You can't crowdsource something that takes weeks or work and multiple revisions. Just doesn't make sense.
- http://en.wikipedia.…ribit
- Doesn't really have much to do with a design contest. I mean sure, it's created by users but that's where the similarity ends.ukit
- akrokdesign0
^
yes, you can. why not? more and more shit will go that road. that's for sure.- they can say. we need 5 templets. etc.akrokdesign
- programming wise, they might not go there. but design. yes.akrokdesign
- randommail0
Does crowdsourcing only affect logo design?
Can crowdsourcing have an affect on large scale projects that require lots of manpower and time? For example, would The Gap crowdsource a redesign & development of their entire new e-comm website? Or could they crowdsource the interior architecture of their stores (more than just a sketch)Are we simply witnessing the demise of a bastion of high-profit margin graphic design?
- The demise of that bastion has been greatly exaggerated...:)ukit
- plash0
I think this is genius!
all the anger and chatter about GAP. when admittedly very little of you are customers. plus they now have you talking about it for the week and will probably continue until next.not to mention the articles in major syndicates and buzz outside the qbn bubble. in the purest form of the word viral..
- akrok0
where's dexter when you need him. lol.
