ETA: Due to public disgust, GAP NIXES UGLY NEW LOGO IN FAVOR OF THE OLD BLUE SQUARE. Their press release afirms everything we said in this blog post. Power to the people and all us design nerds! –Max

Or rather, it should have been about buy-in.

A few days ago, on their Facebook page, Gap updated their status with:

Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing.  We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to… see other ideas.  Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.

By “Passionate debate” they really mean, “everybody hates it” and by “thrilled” they probably really mean, “at least everybody’s talking about us.” Such is the nature of spin.

Says Gawker:

The main problem: Gap just stuck the logo on their website without bothering to tell anyone they were rebranding, or why. The secondary problem: the logo is dumb. Ad Age explains the sophisticated critiques of Gap’s new strategic direction being posited by the world’s foremost corporate branding experts:

Across the internet detractors have been picking apart the new look, with the most common sentiment being that it looks like something a child created using a clip-art gallery.

Even had Gap conducted a campaign first, announcing a new look, maybe run a test instead of just plunking the new logo in the corner of their site, they might have achieved a small measure of buy-in. Instead, their actions were jarring. This is not a new product making a splash, complete with press releases and stock jumps. This is a LOGO. To quote Emily, Waxcreative’s Creative Director: “This is the icon that reassures people that you are who you are. There is integrity implied. There is relationship behind it. Changing your logo is not a move to make lightly or without strategy.”

Art may jar audiences, but design must communicate clearly and smoothly (This is something that Emily says a lot). And the lameness of the new Gap logo aside, the last thing any company wants to do is to cause their audience to question the brand, because the brand represents the message. Communication: Fail.

Emily says: “I have nothing against Helvetica, but this logo is uninspired and says nothing. The old logo was so recognizable, I just can’t imagine what Gap was thinking in not easing in such a huge change.” As far back as ten years ago, when Kelly Goto and Emily first published Web ReDesign 2.0, they talked about the importance of easing an audience into redesign changes. They focused on web redesign, but the tenet holds true whether visual or product or packaging. If you change it drastically, ease your established audience in. Ease them in and they will follow. Jar them and they will balk. And in today’s twittersphere/blogosphere/Facebook-ruled-universe, that backlash will happen quickly and spread like crazy.

Sometimes you can just boldly go and to heck with the masses. For instance, when Apple first announced the iPad, there was instant backlash about the name. Eventually, though, this debate was forgotten, the name was solidified in the First World zeitgeist, and the iPad was accepted as the cool, innovative new piece of hardware. People bought into the reality. But that kind of initial backlash would have sank a lesser company’s product before it even hit.

Epilogue: Just a day after Gap’s unannounced release of their new logo,  Craplogo.me showed up. You can make your very on Helvetica-and-blue-gradiant-square logo in two clicks. We had fun with it, but at her desk across the studio Emily muttered, “No one at Gap is happy right now.”

Indeed. But they have no one but themselves to blame.

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