Last week, the American Medical Association released a new policy regarding the use of Adobe Photoshop in advertising. The policy hopes to encourage advertisers and people in advertising and fashion industries to work with groups involved in child and adolescent health to come up with guidelines for the use of Photoshop in advertising imagery. Basically, the AMA’s complaint is that the fashion and advertising industries use Photoshop to create unrealistic and unhealthy body images for young people, especially young women. They even cited (although they did not include a link) to a photo where the model’s body was altered so much that her waist was actually narrower than her head.

The AMA isn’t talking about plain, old sloppy Photoshop work like this Katy Perry ad. (Can you spot the bad Photoshop work here?)

No, what the AMA is talking about are ads where women’s bodies are drastically altered to a point where they make the original proportions of the Barbie doll seem realistic. They’re right, advertisers do use Photoshop to create bodies that do not occur in nature. I know this for a fact because I was a part of the problem a few years ago when I worked for a big ad agency. Our number one client was one of the biggest beer companies in the world and we used women in a LOT of our work. Most beer ads feature women because beer drinkers, by and large, are men. So it stands to reason that an attractive spokesmodel is going to get the attention of the guys who are drinking the beer.

In the advertising industry, when you see a photograph of a woman, you can be sure that it’s been gone over pretty carefully with Photoshop (Katy Perry photo notwithstanding). Photos are retouched and have blemishes removed, color is enhanced, flaws in the photo are corrected and so forth. But often, it doesn’t end there…especially in the summer ads where many of the girls are shown wearing bikinis. I can remember getting marked up photo sheets asking to have a woman’s waist reduced, arms and legs “tightened up” a bit, cleaning up shoulders, etc.

So you’d bring this photo into Photoshop and you’d start off by making the standard color and blemish fixes. Then you broke out your clone stamp tool (the Photoshop equivalent of a surgeon’s scalpel) and start chiseling away. I will admit it’s fun work because you are basically creating something that isn’t real and the challenge is to do it in such a way that millions of people (or tens of millions) are going to see it and you’re not going to leave any fingerprints behind. It’s a challenge. In the end, you’d end up with something like the photo below (I could have used a more graphic example, but many of them involved scantily-or-less-clad women, so I went with a family-friendly alternative).

At first glance, what you notice is that the color is much better in the second photo and that the models skin is lightened and blemishes removed. Now look a little closer. Notice on the original photo that her collarbones really stand out? Well, this would never do so let’s just go ahead and airbrush/clone stamp it a little to make them less noticeable. Now what? How about that little bulge on her right side. I know that it’s just her rib cage jutting out a bit from the angle the photographer has her standing at, but I think we should shave a bit off there. So now, instead of going down and cutting inward, it’s a more gentle slope. And to wrap it up, let’s trim her left side, too. As it is, she already looks skinny, but you know what they say about cameras adding pounds? Let’s shave a couple of inches off the left side just to smooth her about a bit. Abracadabra!

This sort of thing goes on all of the time in the industry and it happens with guys, too, but it’s different. I once worked on a big campaign which featured wresting superstar Bill Goldberg. They had all of these intimidating shots of this HUGE guy, but we had to go through and fix those photos too. Not with his physique, though, we had to retouch the grey in his beard. I don’t think the vanity came from the Goldberg camp, though, because if you look at his promo shot below, there’s plenty of grey. I actually believe the creative director on the project thought the no-grey look made him look cooler which meant we’d sell more beer. I want to meet the guy who made his beer purchasing decision based on the lack of grey hair in Goldberg’s beard. To him, I offer a hearty, “You’re welcome, buddy!”

So what’s the answer to all of this? I guess I come down on the side of Photoshop here because it’s one of the most powerful tools in the modern graphic designer’s arsenal (sorry for the mixed metaphor). And like any tool or weapon, they can be very useful or very dangerous in the wrong set of hands. I think that we, as a society, are very quick to point fingers and we spend time looking for someone to blame, but this isn’t Photoshop’s fault.

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.