Gap Logo Redesign and the Ongoing Helvetica Saga

This story broke last week, but boy it is still creating waves in the design community! One week ago, Gap quietly introduced their new logo on their website, and the online buzz was instantaneous. Amongst other prominent bloggers, Abe Sauer from well-known branding blog brandchannel.com panned the new logo, says in his recent article “Gap has dropped its iconic logo in favor of something that looks like it cost $17 from an old Microsoft Word clipart gallery.” Ouch.

Gapgate has also brought about the conversation about design’s most ubiquitous font – Helvetica. Helvetica seems to be one of these fonts that people either love or hate. Gap has been using Helvetica for quite some time in their secondary messaging such as window displays, but making it their primary logo mark brings it to an entirely different and much more central place in the brand’s hierarchy.

To address the widespread attention, Gap North America’s CEO Marka Hansen made the following statement on Huffington Post:

The natural step for us on this journey is to see how our logo – one that we’ve had for more than 20 years – should evolve. Our brand and our clothes are changing and rethinking our logo is part of aligning with that. We want our customers to take notice of Gap and see what it stands for today. We chose this design as it’s more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward.

Moving forward is one thing, but is Helvetica as the primary brand identity really modern these days? For a font that was designed in the 1950’s and has been used incredibly widely since, it’s hard not to question whether it is even possible to have an ownable brand mark when it relies so heavily on this font.

Gap has opened up the conversation with a crowdsourcing post on their Facebook page, asking fans to give their input and even submit designs. Interestingly, they haven’t updated their Facebook page with the new logo.