The Gap

As many of you are aware, The GAP has decided they need to refresh their brand. One of the most common changes you can make when doing a brand refresh is to change your logo. The thing is, this takes a lot more time, effort, public testing, and care than I think a lot of people realize. It is clear The Gap didn't do as much as they should have.


Here's the side-by-side. A beautiful, old, established mark on the left and a shiny, new, terrible mark on the right. I feel like a lot of people have been bashing this change without using anything but insults, I'm going to do more analysis on it than that, but first we need to talk about why this happened.

There are many major names, not just clothing, that have been going through an identity crisis over the past couple years with a need to re-invent themselves (Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Walmart, and MySpace to name a few). Even our own 3D Conferencing LLC changed to 3D Virtual Events with two logo changes, though we're quite settled now. This is creating an environment where those in charge start to panic as all their competition begins to change, and they feel the need to change as well if they're going to keep up.

The evolution of business is a good thing. It's what fuels innovation in new business strategies, products, and of course, branding. The problem is I feel like a lot of people are looking to a logo to do the heavy lifting, and it's just not going to get the job done by itself. Business doesn't just magically appear because you change a logo. A company doesn't magically make drastic changes to the way they operate because they change a logo. Those are what are really required to "re-invent" a brand. It needs to be an internal change first, only then can a logo be created that reflects on what the new company is.

On to The Gap's new logo. I've been watching over the past week as the story unfolds, trying to give them a chance to explain why they made the design decisions they made. This is the best answer I've read so far from their corporate offices, and it's not a very good one:

I've been president at Gap brand for the past three years, and I've been living and breathing the changes we've been making on our journey to make Gap more relevant to our customers...We chose this design as it's more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward.

~ Marka Hansen, President, Gap North America

Her answer is because the design is more contemporary and current. I feel it's a safe assumption to say Gap thinks it's contemporary because it uses Helvetica. Now, I'm a Helvetica lover, and I love using it. Helvetica Neue in particular and all its wonderful weights make me very happy. It's clean, polished, neutral, and very well established. That said, at this point I don't think we can call anything contemporary anymore just because it uses Helvetica. Helvetica was designed in 1957, over half a century ago. It is very modern. It is NOT contemporary, and it is certainly NOT current.

The second part of the statement is what really gets me though. "It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward." I could not disagree more. I think it takes The Gap's heritage, acknowledges it, then drags it screaming through the dirt. First of all, it's a painful miniature nod way off in the right hand side behind the "p". It really looks more like an afterthought than something that was carefully considered and designed, and doesn't appear to be actually integrated into the design at all. Second, and this is the worst part for me, I guarantee you the conversation with the designer went something like this:

Designer: "Here's the next iteration of your mark. We've added a solid blue square to it as a slight nod to the old logo.

Gap: "It needs something more. I don't feel like we've pushed this as far as we can. How about a gradient?"

And that's all the thought that went into it. I just don't see how adding a gradient acknowledges "the blue box while still taking it forward." A gradient is "taking it forward"? I think "gradient" and the first thing that comes to mind is discovering it in Adobe Illustrator CS2 in my high school design course and thinking how cool it was. A plain, standard gradient is a gimmick used when people don't think enough has been done with the design, and it's a bad gimmick at that.

Fortunately, The Gap has taken all the harsh criticism to heart. Unfortunately, they're turning to crowd sourcing to fix it. I'm sure they'll get a great result from it, it's just a shame they have to turn to a method that will waste the time (and therefore money) of hundreds of designers whose work doesn't get picked. They should have gotten better effort from whoever they went to for the design in the first place.

This designer/brand director thought their logo was great to begin with.

UPDATE

The Gap has decided to simply revert to their old logo and forgo crowd sourcing. Great to see them listening to not only their customers, but graphic designers as well.