GAP Bad Taste Logo
Does a logo makes a company big or does a company makes a logo big?
One of the biggest catastrophes in the history of company rebranding took place in late 2010 when GAP, a casual and low priced clothing retailer, decided to change their logo.
Just weeks before the start of the busy 2010 Christmas season, GAP decided that their market presence needed to be upgraded. After consulting long and hard with their advertising and marketing firm, the cherished logo that they had been sporting for over twenty years disappeared from the front page of their website.
It was replaced by a new logo consisting of a plain white background with a single word – Gap – in a bold, unassuming sans serif font. The only other detail in this new piece was a small blue box behind the last letter, jutting out precariously from the ‘p’ like a splinter of broken bone. The blue box featured a slight diagonal fade from a lighter blue to a darker blue. Within days, like a quiet cancer and with no heralding trumpet blasts or fanfare, the old GAP logo was out and the new GAP logo had replaced it – permanently, or so it seemed.
But the quiet didn’t last. It started with a tiny buzzing noise around the peripherals of the online GAP scene and soon entire sections of the worldwide web were humming with activity. It was clear across the board that people didn’t like the new GAP logo. Many resented it. Some even hated it.
GAP responded positively. They loved their new logo, they claimed, but were also open to others’ ideas about it. GAP claimed that their new logo was only the first stage in a giant crowdsourcing experiment to help them re-invent themselves for the new century. GAP executives opened a contest in which average design wannabes could enter their designs to compete against the hated new logo. Cutting edge doodles flooded in by the thousands. It seemed that almost everyone wanted a piece of the new GAP pie.
Contestants scrawled the legendary three letters in hundreds of different fonts, serif and sans serif, capital letters and lower case, print and cursive. The blue was integrated in a thousand different ways and in a thousand different shades of itself. Among other visual word plays, many budding designers attempted in case after case to successfully integrate an actual gap in the word ‘GAP.’ There were parodies of other famous logos, overlapping letters, fancy, crumbling fonts, and a hundred different grays on blues. But none of these were ever chosen.
Although on the surface this seemed like a great idea – exploit the passionate reaction and get the public involved – there was a fierce outcry among the professional design community. People who get paid for doing quality work hate it when that work is undermined by the exploitation of talented amateurs trying to break into the business. By eliciting free design work from the general public, GAP infuriated a large part of the professional design community. Though it looked innocent enough at first glance, at the heart of crowd sourcing, many professional designers insisted, was a deep disrespect for the professional community that was being snubbed.
On October 12, 2010, just six days after the unveiling of the new logo, GAP returned to the original “blue box” logo, its tail between its legs.
Read the rest of the story here:
http://logotalks.com/2011/02/22/the-story-of-gap-rebranding-process/
One of the biggest catastrophes in the history of company rebranding took place in late 2010 when GAP, a casual and low priced clothing retailer, decided to change their logo.
Just weeks before the start of the busy 2010 Christmas season, GAP decided that their market presence needed to be upgraded. After consulting long and hard with their advertising and marketing firm, the cherished logo that they had been sporting for over twenty years disappeared from the front page of their website.
It was replaced by a new logo consisting of a plain white background with a single word – Gap – in a bold, unassuming sans serif font. The only other detail in this new piece was a small blue box behind the last letter, jutting out precariously from the ‘p’ like a splinter of broken bone. The blue box featured a slight diagonal fade from a lighter blue to a darker blue. Within days, like a quiet cancer and with no heralding trumpet blasts or fanfare, the old GAP logo was out and the new GAP logo had replaced it – permanently, or so it seemed.
But the quiet didn’t last. It started with a tiny buzzing noise around the peripherals of the online GAP scene and soon entire sections of the worldwide web were humming with activity. It was clear across the board that people didn’t like the new GAP logo. Many resented it. Some even hated it.
GAP responded positively. They loved their new logo, they claimed, but were also open to others’ ideas about it. GAP claimed that their new logo was only the first stage in a giant crowdsourcing experiment to help them re-invent themselves for the new century. GAP executives opened a contest in which average design wannabes could enter their designs to compete against the hated new logo. Cutting edge doodles flooded in by the thousands. It seemed that almost everyone wanted a piece of the new GAP pie.
Contestants scrawled the legendary three letters in hundreds of different fonts, serif and sans serif, capital letters and lower case, print and cursive. The blue was integrated in a thousand different ways and in a thousand different shades of itself. Among other visual word plays, many budding designers attempted in case after case to successfully integrate an actual gap in the word ‘GAP.’ There were parodies of other famous logos, overlapping letters, fancy, crumbling fonts, and a hundred different grays on blues. But none of these were ever chosen.
Although on the surface this seemed like a great idea – exploit the passionate reaction and get the public involved – there was a fierce outcry among the professional design community. People who get paid for doing quality work hate it when that work is undermined by the exploitation of talented amateurs trying to break into the business. By eliciting free design work from the general public, GAP infuriated a large part of the professional design community. Though it looked innocent enough at first glance, at the heart of crowd sourcing, many professional designers insisted, was a deep disrespect for the professional community that was being snubbed.
On October 12, 2010, just six days after the unveiling of the new logo, GAP returned to the original “blue box” logo, its tail between its legs.
Read the rest of the story here:
http://logotalks.com/2011/02/22/the-story-of-gap-rebranding-process/