I ran across this video a while ago and have been meaning to repost it. I have a few minutes today, so here goes. It’s a video by Cincinnati-based designer Adam Ladd. Ladd showed his 5-year-old daughter logos from some of the biggest companies in the world and recorded her responses. It’s surprising at how many she actually gets right…apparently all of those people warning us of the dangers of exposing kids to too much advertising is well warranted. Watch the video and I have a couple of comments after.

Fresh Impressions on Brandmarks (from my 5-year-old)

I think it’s really interesting that his daughter hits not only on the brands that she (presumably) has direct experience with (e.g., Disney and Pepsi, which she refers to as the ‘pop from the pizza place’), but also products that she isn’t a direct consumer of (e.g., Starbucks and BP). It really is impressive that more often than not she either knows the brand name or the category it falls in. It seems to me that the ones that really stick in her mind the most are the simplest, which goes along with what I’ve always believed—simpler is often better. On some of the more complex logos (Boeing, for example), she doesn’t really know what it’s for (I’ll admit that I didn’t know what it was, either), but she just kind of says what she thinks it is.

I appreciated that when she sees the McDonald’s logo, she knows what it is right away, but she also adds something in that I never considered. She says that McDonald’s ‘M’ looks like it’s made up of french fries, which is a connection that I am sure I would have never made. It’s really amazing to see how young minds work sometimes, isn’t it?

My favorite part of the video, hands down, is when she IDs the Greyhound, Jaguar and PUMA logos each as ‘a cheetah,’ one right after the other. I never really thought about how much alike all of those logos looked.

Fun video…hope you liked it.

In the interest of jump starting the blog, I give you this—Cheese or Font? It’s just a silly little website that gives you a name and you have to guess whether it is the name of a cheese or the name of a font. Don’t laugh…it’s harder than you think.

Cheese or Font?

Head over and give it a shot.

Okay, I know that I posted something on Facebook the other day about doing a NCAA tournament-style bracket deciding the games based on the teams’ logos. I actually spent a little time on it and, once I really got into it, realized that many of the team logos consist either primarily or solely of letters. I guess I never really thought about that, but it’s true. Sure, there is some design element to the logos, but it’s kind of boring.

So what I am going to do is the same sort of thing, but with corporate logos which gives me a lot more to work with. There are a few different ways I can do this and I’m still sorting it out, but I’ll get it started either next week or the week after. I know this isn’t a terribly exciting post, but I wanted to mention it just so that nobody thinks I completely blew it off. Stay tuned.

To call the last week a whirlwind for the Gap would be an understatement. A firestorm is a little more like it. In the end, the Gap did something that is becoming increasingly common—relented to the wishes of consumers and ditched the new logo in favor of the old logo. It’s a lot to follow, so I put together a quick graphic timeline of the Gap logo.

So as you can see from the graphic above, for over 20 years the Gap had the classic Gap logo. Then last week they decided to spring a new logo on the world. The new logo, officially announced on October 8, went over about as well as the new Coke recipe back in the 80′s. People hated it and the internet was awash with critical tweets, Facebook posts and blogs (including this one).

A few days later, the Gap saw the light and killed the new logo and reverted to the original. There was actually an interesting in-between announcement when someone from the Gap (I can’t remember who and am not curious enough to look the name up) made the announcement that the new logo was just part of a process and that they loved the feedback from the public. They loved it so much, in fact, that they wanted crowdsource a new logo. Hey, everybody’s a designer! Send us your ideas for free and we’ll use it. Here’s a Gap gift card for $50. Thanks!

The only thing professional designers hate more than bad design is crowdsourcing. It completely devalues graphic design as a profession. I’ve written about it before and I probably will again, it’s just a way for companies to get something for nothing while turning design into a commodity. Naturally, the internet lit up again with protests from designers about what a stupid idea it was.

In the end, Gap made out okay from all of this. While not everybody knew about the logo change, they were one of the most hotly debated (not much of a debate, I guess, when everybody hates what you did) topics on the internet, even making their way into print and broadcast media. Suddenly, everybody was talking about the Gap. The chain received an overwhelming amount of feedback at no additional cost and were able to pull themselves back from the bring before it cost them a fortune (unlike Tropicana who took it in the wallet with their package redesign-and-reversal process). And in the end, Gap relented to popular demand, which gives people the feeling that Gap really does care about their customers.

It’s been suggested by some that this is all a PR ploy, but I don’t think so. Why not? Two reasons. First of all, if they were trying to pull something off, I think they’d come up with a better fake logo. This logo was too bad to have been done on purpose, I think. Second, the whole crowdsourcing thing. If they were being advised, that would have never come up.

I just think it was a very large company exercising very poor judgement. It happens.

Anyway, welcome back Gap logo, we hardly missed ye.

The Gap, a retailer known for creating fashion trends and dressing the young and stylish (who are too poor to shop at Banana Republic, but wouldn’t be caught dead in Old Navy), launched their new logo today. Above you can see the old logo on the left and the new logo on the right.

While the classic Gap logo is a little dated, I am really underwhelmed at the new logo. It’s Helvetica bold and a blue box that is, for some reason, partially obscured by the p in Gap. The blue box looks like an afterthought, thrown in at the last minute. It’s like they looked at the Helvetica word mark and just KNEW it needed something extra. I imagine an exchange going something like this:

“I like it. It’s bold, yet classic. This mark is going to be with us for a long time,” the creative director says. “But maybe it needs just a little something extra. Something that really gets the brand across. We need something really designy.”

“We could put the whole thing in a shiny-looking circle sort of like the 989 Design logo at the top of this page,” the graphic designer says.

“A shiny 3d-looking circle? What is this? 2008? We need something that SCREAMS 2010 and beyond!”

“Well maybe we try using a box. We had a box in our last logo and that one lasted a long time.”

“Hmmm…a box, you say?” replies the CD. “Yes, I like the sound of that. But it can’t be the same…it needs to be a little different.”

“How about I give it a gradient fill?” asks GD.

“YES! Now you’re talking. More, give me more.”

“We make the box really small and…um…put it before the G!”

“No…box first isn’t forward thinking enough,” says the CD. “I’ve got it. Randomly stick it behind one of the letters.”

“How about behind the p?” asks GD.

“Perfecto! It’s a masterpiece.

It’s not that it’s a terrible logo…it’s just really bland. Nothing says design or style. They’d have done better for themselves, in my opinion, by keeping the old look, adding the gradient and updating the font. Bam! Done. They were so busy trying to think outside the box (pun intended) that they stepped on the design.