<story><title>Dear Gap, I have your new logo.</title><url>http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_new_logo.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ryanwaggoner</author><text>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 &quot;evil&quot;  back in Pandora&apos;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 great? Rarely. But it&apos;ll be good enough for most, and if it&apos;s not, they&apos;re out nothing. See 99designs.com.&lt;p&gt;This seems like classic game theory. While it&apos;s in the design industry&apos;s collective best interest to never work on spec like this, it might be in an individual designer&apos;s best interest to design Gap&apos;s logo for free. And even if it&apos;s not, if most of them think it is, you&apos;ve still lost. Believe me, I understand that Gap&apos;s move here is a slap in the face, but many designers out there will do it anyway, just for the chance to say they designed Gap&apos;s logo.</text></comment>
<story><title>Dear Gap, I have your new logo.</title><url>http://weblog.muledesign.com/2010/10/dear_gap_i_have_your_new_logo.php</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ryanwaggoner</author><text>&lt;i&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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 may actually be the most important part of your brand. And the logo’s job is simply to help evoke those pleasant experiences.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone else find this pretentious? I somehow doubt that most of the world&apos;s biggest brands have logos that came about through this process, or at least are measurably different than they would have been if a talented designer came up with something that felt right and looked good.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.murdercapers.com/corporate/companyLogos/CompanyLogosNew.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.murdercapers.com/corporate/companyLogos/CompanyLo...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I bet a lot of those are just variations on the original logo of the company when it was started. Maybe I&apos;m completely wrong though; just seems like if you&apos;d expect &lt;i&gt;anyone&lt;/i&gt; to think that designing a new logo should include hundreds of hours and dozens or hundreds of customer and marketing surveys, it would be a branding firm who wants to charge you for all that. I&apos;m not sure anyone else would be able to tell the difference between a logo that came from that process and one that came from a few hours of a great designer throwing out ideas.</text></comment>