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The Gap: New Logo - The Gap Re-Brands With New Helvetica Font
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by NowPublic Staff | October 6, 2010 at 09:44 am
13786 views | 0 Recommendations | 10 comments
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The Gap's New Logo Draws Criticism In Blogs And Twitter
San Francisco based retail giant, The Gap, has a new logo replacing the old iconic Navy color with white serif font.
The new Gap logo features a Helvetica typeface with a small blue square in the corner.
Curiously enough, the new brand and logo seems to have been rolled out only in the USA. At the time of this post Gap Canada and Gap Europe still have the old Gap logo on their websites.
Changing the look and feel of a brand is never an easy thing and often companies deal with barbs flung at them from critics in the blogs and on Twitter.
The Gap's new logo is no exception. So here is a quick round of quotes and comments about the new Gap logo from design and branding critics.
Comments About new Gap Logo: Creative Intuition
I’ve seen high school design students do better. The gradient of the logo really cheapens the overall identity and it lacks any sort of strength or visual interest. The font says nothing, well it does say something… boring.
Comments About New Gap Logo: Sitepoint
To say the logo is a little bland may be understating things. The navy square looks like it was thrown on at the last minute, possibly to keep some kind of connection to the old logo? It appears to be a major step backwards and I can’t understand why they changed it.
Comments About The New Gap Logo: Fashion Copious
Poor thing. I feel sad for this company, who can't seem to make it's way out of the 90's.
This new Gap logo, ironically, belongs more to financial institution than a clothing retailer.
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (10)
at 09:50 on October 6th, 2010
Looks like the logo for an investment bank. Did they have to use one of the default fonts from MS Word? Really?
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SMH (not verified)at 11:02 on October 6th, 2010
When are companies going to learn that re-branding =/= new logo, and making a logo more "modern" doesn't mean it will be good. This is just bad.
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Yam (not verified)at 11:57 on October 6th, 2010
Looks like crap can't believe some one got paid to make it. Shame on you GAP
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Bill Brammer (not verified)at 12:33 on October 6th, 2010
That is a good use of a gradient box as a design element. I am sure the ID package will blow everyone away.
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NofoJake (not verified)at 14:17 on October 6th, 2010
My cynical theory from deep inside the trenches of advertising: 1) Gap focus-grouped its brand to come up with an "emotional map" of key words like "effortless," "reliable," "unpretentious" and "true blue" 2) Then it RFP'd six design firms to submit 37 logos each based on these meaningless words 3) After 1,942 internal meetings gathering the input of buyers, account directors and vice presidents of finance, they narrowed the choices down to their favorite elements of 16 different logos and asked two of the firms to create some hybrid logos incorporating these elements 4) Four days before the scheduled launch of their new brand, they decided the new hybrid logos weren't going where they were hoping, so they panicked and called in a favor from their old agency ... the one they were planning to fire after the new logo was chosen 5) The call came in at 3:47 pm on a Friday, and all the art directors at the old agency were forced to cancel their weekend plans to come up with a shit-ton more logo ideas by 9:00 am Monday 6) Gap sat on these new ideas for 17 days while they had an internal reorg 7) The new vice president of camisoles, trying to justify his existence, came up with the current logo at his dining room table on a Thursday night and presented to the board of directors the very next morning 8) This dining-room-table story will be told in the annual report and at shareholder meetings as proof that Gap shakes things up and doesn't do stuff like other big companies (Gap corporate brand guys: Am I close?)
at 15:54 on October 6th, 2010
Nofojake - that was a brilliant analysis
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James yu (not verified)at 01:00 on October 7th, 2010
Now, you too can make your very own new Gap logo: www.makeyourowngaplogo.com/
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Jul (not verified)at 06:42 on October 7th, 2010
This logo is better: www.reddit.com/tb/do2k4
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steve85 (not verified)at 09:08 on October 7th, 2010
I wouldn't be too concerned with this logo. Although it looks like Silicon Valley decided to design, real designers are predicting this will go to the scraps. gnomeflash.com/ gives some good analysis through the eyes of a designer. I have to agree with them that this is the Tropicana logo change all over again.
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jeff1974 (not verified)at 11:29 on October 12th, 2010
I haven't read everything about it but I would tend to think that this was more of a publicity stunt and that they never meant to change the logo. Did it work?