Here’s a fact about me – I’m a Helvetica atheist. Yup that’s right I said it. I’m not a believer in our lord and saviour Helvetica and I sure as hell don’t think it’s the holy grail of typography. In fact, at the risk of assassination, I’m gonna put it out there – its not really that different from Arial anyway! (yeah, take that ya plaid shirt, skinny jean, horn-rimmed glasses wearing, emo-haircutted, pierced and tattooed lot.)
Turns out that the pleasure of having the last laugh is all mine. If anyone’s seen the new and supposedly improved version of the Gap logo they’ll know what I’m talking about. Not only does it come off as pretentious as opposed to the ‘modern’ and ‘clean’ look I’m sure the designers were going for, it doesn’t hold a candle to their previous one. And you know why? Because the design looks like it was done in MS Word. I’m all for clean and modern and ya-da-ya-da but taking a classic design and taking away every bit of personality it ever had is not original, it’s just silly. I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall during the meeting where the designer came up with, what I’m sure must’ve been, an insightful rationale for this logo with a boardroom full of suits hailing his every word as gospel (I’m willing to bet my right hand that there was some discussion about thinking ‘outside the box’).
good ol' classic on the left and well the new one on the right
Anyway so after an online outcry, initially Gap tried salvaging the situation by allowing their Facebook friends to come up with their own logos. Turns out that in this digital age, “friends” don’t really like working for free and so the backlash continued. Till Gap held up their hands, admitted their marketing boo-boo and decided to revert back to the previous logo. All was good again in the world, and somewhere out there the designers of the Pepsi logo sniggered ironically at the fact that Tropicana and Gap have had their branding efforts blow up in their faces and somehow that monstrosity of a Pepsi logo persists. Sigh.
Check out this link to make your own crap umm i mean Gap logo - http://www.makeyourowngaplogo.com/
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