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Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

weblog.muledesign.com

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Re: Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

#61

Post by lwhi »

jimboyoungblood wrote: post #10
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #4

Posts like this seem like the designer equivalent of the music labels spending years complaining about how sharing music is wrong and trying to put the "evil" back in Pandora's box, while millions of people merrily continue to download music off bittorrent anyway. The reality of the internet is that people can easily solicit work on spec from thousands of designers, and they will get good stuff in return. Will it be…

To be fair to the music labels, they at least have copyright law on their side. This is more like how professional journalists whine about bloggers.

Crowdsourcing involves getting many people to work for you for nothing; after which, you only pay one person.

I don't think it's surprising that many people dislike the idea.

Re: Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

#63

Post by kmort »

Call me cynical but a very similar play happened with Kraft and their launch of a new Vegemite+cheese spread.

They named it "iSnack 2.0", were met with strong derision, opened up a naming contest, and finally settled with the consumer-selected "Cheesybite". This whole rigmarole earned them quite a bit of publicity. People were even buying-up the iSnack-labeled jars before the renaming thinking they'd become collector's items.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegemite#Vegemite_Cheesybite:_n...

"iSnack 2.0" and the new Gap logo are too terrible to happen innocently.

Re: Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

#64

Post by webwright »

lwhi wrote: post #59
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #4

Posts like this seem like the designer equivalent of the music labels spending years complaining about how sharing music is wrong and trying to put the "evil" back in Pandora's box, while millions of people merrily continue to download music off bittorrent anyway. The reality of the internet is that people can easily solicit work on spec from thousands of designers, and they will get good stuff in return. Will it be…

"While it's in the design industry's collective best interest to never work on spec like this, it might be in an individual designer's best interest to design Gap's logo for free." People play the lottery - but I wouldn't argue it's in their best interests to do so.

Yeah, and people invest dozens or hundreds of sales hours to land a million dollar contract. It's all about the ratio of risk to reward. For many/most designers, the ability to say, "I designed the Gap logo" is a big enough reward to justify the risk. And, unlike the lottery (but more like my sales example), it's at least somewhat based on merit and effort.

Re: Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

#66

Post by Cushman »

lwhi wrote: post #61
jimboyoungblood wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to the music labels, they at least have copyright law on their side. This is more like how professional journalists whine about bloggers.

Crowdsourcing involves getting many people to work for you for nothing; after which, you only pay one person. I don't think it's surprising that many people dislike the idea.

Alternately, crowdsourcing involves many people getting the chance to try their hand at something that, normally, only one person would do.

I don't think it's surprising that that one person dislikes the idea.

Re: Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

#67

Post by hugh3 »

joezydeco wrote: post #51
edw519 wrote: post #23

Before I realized what this post really was, I tried to peel off the post-it note with my mouse. Now that's an entry that would have gotten some attention.

I thought it was the post-it note, and this was all satire. Guess I better read this again.

I did too. And then I got to thinking that a post-it note with "Gap" written on it might make a pretty good logo.

Re: Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

#68

Post by andrewljohnson »

Posts like this misunderstand how decisions about corporate logos are made. You need to back-stab the ad agency and cozy up to the marketing VP to change the logo.

Posting like this on the web just invites the marketing VP and the account rep to go out to dinner and laugh at your feeble attempts, over a couple of stiff drinks.

It really is exactly like Mad Men.

Re: Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

#69

Post by ataggart »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #36
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #16

I researched your customers. Talked to a variety of them, in fact. Asked them not only about The Gap, but about their own lives. Their needs. Anxieties. Their thoughts on the future. I took all that into account. I also interviewed employees in a few of your stores. (They’re quite dedicated, you know.) I asked them how they felt about the company and about their interactions with customers. Because customer service m…

I thought this was going to be an article bashing designers, I kept waiting for the punch line. I understand what he's saying, but it comes across very pretentious. And I say that as a designer.

Three words:

Pepsi Gravitational Field

Re: Dear Gap, I have your new logo.

#70

Post by prawn »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #16

I researched your customers. Talked to a variety of them, in fact. Asked them not only about The Gap, but about their own lives. Their needs. Anxieties. Their thoughts on the future. I took all that into account. I also interviewed employees in a few of your stores. (They’re quite dedicated, you know.) I asked them how they felt about the company and about their interactions with customers. Because customer service m…

It's not pretentious, it's just what happens with a big budget rebrand. I don't know if I can explain my take on all this that well, but I'll try: You can either do something at one level, playing off gut-feel/fairly safe assumptions and get it 80% right, or spend 10 times as much, do research and maybe get it 95% right.

That said, in an argument, designers will talk about all those lovely theoretical things they were trained to do. Then, most of them will just sit down and muck around with fonts, shapes, etc until they have something that fits the bill.

Same is often true with web design (my gig). You can use your experience, gut, etc to create a $10k site, or you could spend $100k to get something not miles dissimilar but involving actual usability testing (instead of gut feel decisions), buckets of documentation, etc. You could spend $100k on a single page microsite if you wanted to take everything to the extreme with endless focus groups, eye-tracking tests, etc. Or you could just put the branding in the top left, use buttons that look like buttons, remember what worked from last time you did some A/B tests, make the text legible, etc.

It's a funny game. Most of the time I estimate/quote by rolling dice rather than spending hours trying to guess the budget of a client or the level of polish they want to pay for with a site.

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