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| old logo on left, new on right |
It looks like the design community is up in arms over the new Gap logo, as can be found on their site. Everyone is voicing their hatred on Twitter (including myself), Brand New's Armin didn't hold back in his review of the new logo, while Mat Dolphin took a more 'I don't like it, but let's wait and see' approach in his review. David Airey didn't bother saying anything, but made his opinion rather clear as well at his LogoDesignLove blog. Pretty much everyone thinks they are going to be pulling a Tropicana and going back to the old logo, but only time will tell.
Since everyone else is being so vocal I figured I might as well get vocal myself about the whole thing. First off, I do think it's terrible. Second, I tend to agree with Mat Dolphin in that it's important we wait and see what direction they plan on going with the brand before it can be considered a full write off.
I'd like to know why they thought Gap needed be rebranded, and how they thought this new logo was an improvement. I like Helvetica, but just because it's a nice, universal font, doesn't mean it works all the time. Here it does not, it just makes it look generic (as is always a danger with a default system font). I don't think this fails because the name of the company is in Helvetica though. It fails because of small, randomly placed blue box with a random gradient on it. I've heard a few attempts at justifying it, the most logical being that they wanted to keep the blue square as to connect with the old identity, but show how they are breaking away from it. Thing is, this is such a departure from the old logo that the blue square doesn't make me think of the old one, it just confuses me and looks like something from a bad design contest, or perhaps something made using PowerPoint.
The old logo wasn't amazing, but it wasn't bad either. When I saw it I knew what I was looking at. They had effectively branded their company. Their new mark doesn't even make me think of their company, it looks to amateurish to evoke thoughts of a giant clothing line.
The thing is, they can save this. It'll take one hell of an branding effort and tons of money (all of which I don't see why they'd want to spend unless they are taking the company in a completely new direction - cheaper and more generic possibly? :P), but they can make us forget the old one and embrace (as much as one might embrace Gap) the new one. Until I know why they made these changes I can't say it's a complete and utter fail, but I can say I think it's really bad so far.
If they are doing a complete rebrand, why didn't they launch everything with the logo? So far all they have done is taken out logo.jpg from their site and inserted newlogo.jpg and apart from that, it seems like they are done. If they had gone with a full rebrand across web and advertising in one big swoop, we might have been able to see how the logo integrates into the rest of the system and been content. Instead the design community is freaking out and attacking Gap for being stupid.
