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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

A bit of background on this. Gap just updated their logo, its getting pretty heavily slammed by the design community (I too think its god awful)

More here: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2010/october/new-gap...

BTW the author's twitter feed, @Mike_FTW is one of the funnier feeds to follow.

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Warning: @Mike_FTW uses a NSFW background.

Maybe in your world. In mine, it's perfectly OK to wear a Red Hat.

It's OK, you're safe from women. Really.

It's not a matter of objecting to the picture. I don't at all. But when you are linking to something that is not safe for work, you are supposed to warn people as common courtesy. Also, I find your tone patronizing and unusual for this community.

Looks like they are getting a good response and more mindshare then they should for a logo. Perhaps this will be the new "new coke/old coke" case study of the future but "now with more crowdsourcing (tm)".

I was thinking the same thing. GAP put out a crappy new logo on purpose (They aren't using it anywhere) knowing it would create buzz. Roll that buzz into a crowdsource contest. And in the end stick with your orig logo.

Yea, that response was a little to happy. Feels planned to me. Bad gradients and Helvetica are almost guaranteed to piss off designers.

http://www.gap.com/ is using it.

Hadn't been to that site in a while...or ever? My first thought? This is how I expect Target's website to look.

Anyone know what the business case for this change was? What was wrong with the old logo? I'm having a hard time understanding what the thinking was here.

Main purpose must be repositioning of the brand - their largest competition is American Apparel. Place the new logo between the old gap logo and the AA logo, the thread linking all three will be pretty obvious.

Wouldn't surprise me if a buy out was on the cards.

Looking at the old logo, I'd say it looks like it's aimed at a fifty-something demographic -- I don't blame them for wanting something that looks "younger".

But the new logo is a mess, and looks like something you'd come up with in Powerpoint in five seconds without changing the defaults. There's nothing wrong ideas-wise with san-serif "gap" over shaded blue square, but it comes out looking bad.

Answering my own question, I found this in the Advertsing Age:

http://adage.com/article?article_id=146353

I don't think this is going to end well for Gap.

The new logo looks worse than bad. It looks like an accident.

The new Gap logo reminds me of a Windows Metafile.

Also worth a quick look: the new Gap Logo sulks on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/GapLogo

Is it just me or is the new design really looking straight from the mid 90s.

yeah for me it looks like something a Hollywood prop department would come up with when tasked with creating a "Logo for Megacorp"

Looks more like they're trying to visually compete with American Apparel's use of Helvetica.

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gawker/2010/10/gaplogo...

http://www.eternitemedia.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01...

EDIT—it looks like someone at iso50 had the same idea: http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/gapdesign2s...

It's a shame. Their condensed old style serif font subtly reminds me of Nirvana's condensed serif font.

http://www.survivingthestores.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06...

http://www.midnightincoventry.co.uk/site/images/stories/nirv...

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