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Lifestyle

Gap in design

Gap unveiled its redesigned logo earlier this week without much fanfare on its own website, but there was lots of discussion elsewhere online – and none of it positive. What happened here?

There’s general disbelief in the design community thus far. How could a multinational company with millions of dollars at its disposal for a new logo be so inept?

It’s a complete surprise how bland the new look is, pairing a so-ubiquitous-it’s-generic Helvetica typeface with a curiously gradiated blue box. There’s not much else to it.

Many commentators likened the result to a child playing with clipart. But some went further creating a mock Twitter site, offering up their own logo suggestions and creating a Gap style log generator.

Gap responded to criticism with a Facebook post that read: “Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to… see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.”

Gap North America president Marka Hansen gave a similarly bewildering statement on Huffington Post.

Whether this was their original intent or just a attempt to put some spin on an embarrassing mistake is unclear, but with uniformly negative comments the statement provoked the company looks even more out of touch than their original logo implied.

UPDATE: The old Gap logo is back. See our before-after-after post.

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