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Comment by mcargian | Hacker News Reader

Wait - so after all that they are not going to milk this into some kind of contest? They are just going to give up and walk away?

"This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing" - what? Isn't that the whole point of this crazy stunt?

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They are pacifying everybody before pulling a MySpace and coming up with a logo that really expresses "creativity":

    GA   P

Most of the "crowd-sourced" reaction I heard was that they should keep their current logo.

If you look at the contestants, you'll see why: http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/design-better-gap-...

I see one (shylion #4052, top row) that could work with a little lovin' but yeah, none of those compare in the slightest. Most of them look like people trolling for prize money -- I'm not familiar with the site but any place there is a promise of cash reward there will be vultures circling the carcass.

NONE of them? I assume that means you've reviewed the more than 4000 that were submitted? I hate to immediately jump on the defensive, but I was a little put-off by the statement. I've used the site for a logo design that I was quite happy with and I've also submitted a few designs that no one was happy with (and for good reason, I'm a terrible designer). So while I have little experience with it, I do think it's a good resource and shouldn't be denounced so quickly.

I've never owned a company and certainly have no real basis for this assumption, but still I assume that I would much rather have thousands of designers at my disposal willing to do iteration after iteration in order win a "prize" and some notoriety to do branding for my company than a single firm who I would feel like I was stuck with after any amount of investment.

Now while I will submit that something of this nature will certainly bring out those "trolling for prize money", I don't agree with the mild implication that the format of the site has nothing more to offer isn't a fair assessment.

Yes, these sites seem to offer a vastly better deal to customers than traditional contracts. But there's a catch: As a consequence, the deal they offer to designers is necessarily so much worse that the only ones participating are those who can't find work elsewhere, ie amateurs. I think the Gap contest perfectly demonstrates that this isn't the type of task where a "Mechanical Turk" approach works. I've looked at the top 200 rated entries, and there's hardly a passable one among them, let alone anything even remotely inspired.

The original logo's distinctive styling makes all of those look pale in comparison.

Most of the ones on the front page aren't the best (after skimming through for a while). I think it is difficult to pick a winner based on voting, but there are definitely some that are better than their original logo.

Edit: There are a few nice ones within the first ~50 of this: http://blog.iso50.com/logos/gap-redesign-contest/

It doesn't matter how the other logos look.

The Gap's brand recognition is so high that it would be absolutely idiotic to swap the logo with a new look.

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