Well it looks as though Gapgate is over as quickly as it appeared. After all the speculation, they did indeed pull a Tropicana. And what started out as a fun little experiment for us, quickly swelled far beyond our expectations. We received hundreds of submissions, so many that we had trouble keeping up. So now it’s time to sort through all of them and choose the winners. But before we do, I wanted talk a little about the contest in general and what we’ve learned during the past week.
As we mentioned in the previous post, the contest is not affiliated with Gap in any way. We are not crowd sourcing a new logo for Gap. To think that we are is to misunderstand the concept of crowd sourcing as well as our intentions. This contest was designed to give people an opportunity to put themselves in the shoes of Laird + Partners; to see what they would do if tasked with the (apparently) impossible mission of rebranding Gap. These mega-rebrands are always hit with a wave of inevitable criticism, but rarely do you see designers offering viable alternatives in addition to their critiques. It’s harder than it looks. I wanted to challenge our readers to not just criticize the new logo, but provide an alternative solution. The contest was an exercise — like a school project — and had nothing to do with Gap’s ludicrous (thankfully temporary) decision to engage in crowd sourcing.
The entries were interesting to say the least. Submissions ran the gamut from tongue-in-cheek innuendo to well executed contenders to the original logo. What filled the space between was a raft of subtle variations and incremental evolutions that all seemed to rely heavily on the original brand. But I suppose that’s what’s at the core of this whole argument: people apparently love the blue square.
So now we leave it up to you again. Please refer to the submissions on the original post, noting the number of the submission (directly below the image on the left) and place your vote here. Voting will be open until 11:59 PM Wednesday October 13th. (Update: Voting is now closed, winners posted soon)
Thanks to everyone who submitted a logo, good luck!
I just put my vote in!
Wow, really lame. My logo never made it up.
In my opinion logos 99 and 171 are the best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbpLhic8Uno&feature=player_embedded
off
I still can’t get over how funny that “Trap” one is. Hahaha. Mad props to whoever made that.
Ultra-Beat! I submitted 2 and neither of them made it!? they were better than half of these…
http://bit.ly/av9YHy
Now my logo has a vote :))
When was the deadline to submit? My logos never made the listing here?
Mine never made the cut either. i think i may have been too late but the deadline said 13th so thought i’d be good!
http://www.alanpower.net/gap.jpg
I submitted mine the day after the contest was up and barely made it…if that helps. #310.
on a serious note – its hard to choose the best submission. really thinking its important to take into account the kind of company gap ie what they represent and the kind of audience they want to reach. i dont think they would try to please the hipster crowd like am appy or urban outf. does. anyway there were a lot of good submissions and it was hard to choose!
on a less serious note #260 killed it with some clever humor.
Igor-
who did that video? do you have any details on it?
So… what happened? I submitted a couple days in advance and didn’t get posted. Looks like I’m not the only one either. If it’s too much to handle, maybe it should simply be limited to a number — first 300 submissions, for example. But if you’re giving a date, it seems like everyone should be included.
http://alexwillms.com/alexwillms-gap.png
Mine never made it either…had fun with the italics: http://bit.ly/bJtE6K
Seriously, don’t fucking encourage such behavior. I’m disgusted that you have stooped this low. Comment, by all means; show some of the efforts people have blogged about even. But running a contest is just as bad as Gap trying to crowdsource a logo. You’re exploiting the naive.
@ Dan
Calm down dude this is poking fun at the situation. None of us really give a crap about or are legitimately trying to “make a difference” for GAP. The winner—which I am hoping is victorious only by humor—gets a friggin’ t-shirt. So relax and have a sit-down.
I’m in the didn’t make it up club too, sent it a few days before the deadline.
http://www.shanekeaney.com/gap.jpg
I don’t care about the prizes, I just did it for fun, but it’s lame they didn’t handle this better, I mean it was a few hundred entries, but it’s not thousands, how many did they expect?
some needy people up in here..
Yeah, it would have been nice to see mine up too, but it was just a contest, and a fun one at that… it’s not like we’re all competing for our logo to be the next Gap logo.
Here’s the first draft of the press release.
Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, we’ve seen an outpouring of comments from losers who have no lives in unadulterated hate of the new logo that we paid an exec’s college student nephew to create. Yay nepotism.
Last week, we couldn’t believe all the hullabaloo around this insignificant change. Even I don’t give a crap. Ultimately, we’ve learned just how much bullshit energy there is around our brand and have decided to address the issue. Because we can’t be bothered to go another round of re-branding–the last took 18 months–we’ll just dust off the old one.
At Gap brand, our customers have always come first, unless of course they’re not white, in which case they are welcome at Old Navy (but only every other Tuesday). We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week and can not believe how much more you care about the logo than we do. We heard you say over and over again that you hate the new logo and expected more from us. Little do you know that we are too busy vacationing in Bali to care. In fact, this press release is being written by our 16-year old intern. Meredith something. On her iPhone.
And so we’ve made the decision–we will bring the old logo back across all channels. The website will go back to our iconic blue box logo and, for Holiday, we’ll turn our blue box red for our seasonal campaign. And poop brown for Halloween.
We’ve learned a lot in this process. Mostly. OK sorta. OK not at all. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way especially since I don’t remember what it was that happened to bring us to the new logo. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community. We don’t care about the parents who buy the clothes for their snobby children who are still using AOL. This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing because we don’t care what you have to say and also because sales are up 37% so come in tomorrow between 2:30 and 2:40 and you can get 3% off purchases $450 or more.
There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way. Maybe we’ll have school children do their best. Works for the Google.
Peace. Love. Capitalism.
my logo didn’t make it 🙁 submitted it on the 10/08. http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e24/snooz3r/ricogap1.png
Actually the winner gets a print as well. Which is why i entered. I am in love with the ‘MADRONE’ GICLEE PRINT’ and If I win thats what I would want more than anything, to go along with the other Scott Hansen prints I have. So alot of us area actually in this for the ART of it. as opposed to the “Crowd Sourcing” scheme