The GAP Rebrand Debacle

And by “debacle”, I don’t mean the design itself, I mean the ridiculous uproar that has come from the design community at large over the new design.

If you’re not familiar with the GAP logo redesign, here it is:

I’ve read a dozen or so “critiques” of the rebrand, and I’m seeing the inevitable torrent of design blog contests and posts showing what they would have done, and showcasing user-submitted logo designs.

I think the new GAP logo isn’t great, but the vapid redesigns are a pointless exercise, for several reasons.

• First, most of these new logo redesigns are just as bad and banal as the new logo.
• Second, we have no idea what the creative brief was that landed the new logo.

Has anyone considered that they’re switching target markets? Maybe this logo is an appropriate solution to new business ideals. And all these contests to redesign in a week’s time? Do any of us honestly think that they landed on this logo in a week? I’m putting money on this being on screen and in meetings for months. But of course we’re all good enough to redesign this logo in a week. That’s also assuming we would actually give up a week straight to work on this to win a contest for a poster and a shirt. Most of us will spend an hour on our lunch break scrolling through our activated typefaces with the letters G-A-P in the preview window, until we come across something we think we like. But is it appropriate? Probably not.

As designers and creatives, we’re a small subset of consumers. Do you think that the 45 year old husband and desk jockey is going to care that the GAP logo is in Helvetica now? He isn’t. He’s concerned with buying khakis, not with the typeface the company logo is set in.

We are supposed to value our profession and provide more than pretty pictures. We’re not artists who get to insist that our opinions are the only ones that matter. We have a responsibility to the public to provide quantitative and qualitative feedback and rationale in our decisions and choices. In an age of UX and UI definition, we should be laying the groundwork for how seriously we want to be taken by the general public, and how professional we are assumed to be. Yelling at how ugly a logo is doesn’t bring us any further than the “cousin of the guy who owns the company who makes logos.”

Let’s all stop pretending that design is just how (subjectively) cool something looks and focus on whether it’s the most aesthetic solution that solves the given issues and problems. If you want to complain about a company’s redesign, fine, go ahead and complain. Though without context, your complaint is strictly aesthetic, and that’s a new argument on the quality and value of one person’s aesthetic opinion verses another’s.