Take AIM

Good bye, little AIM guy. You served us well, in buddy icons throughout my school career.

I’m not sure how I feel about this one. I mean, It looks fine. And all the collateral surrounding it looks equally as good. But it feels a bit too Tumblr, Vimeo, Aviary-y. It seems to entrenched in trying to look like something and feels like a copy of a copy of a copy. Huh.

But what is good is a desperately needed change from the near 15 years of AOL stagnation.

The famous Starbucks logo seems to just keep getting enhanced over time. Enhance… enhance… enhance…

Yikes. This one has been making the rounds as of late, and I couldn’t help but echo everyone’s thoughts here. Here we have a logo, fine as you would hope any logo could be. It’s for a new blog run by the Smithsonian about “people and ideas that likely will shape the way we will live one day.”

Look closely at the logo. Three gears. It evokes industry, mechanics, engineering – smart people doing smart things. Or so you’d hope. If you’re perceptive, you’ll see that all three gears interlock in such a manner as to prevent them from actually moving. Locked in place. The irony is not lost on me. The point being, as Christian Palino puts it at the Brand New blog, it’s a “great reminder that creating good logos begins with understanding your subject matter and ends with great craftsmanship — neither of which were present here.”

The logo has since been updated.

Cut the Gap

The internet is a-buzz about the new Gap logo.

The new logo was unceremoniously pushed to their website a week or two ago, and the internet hasn’t looked back since. Designers (including myself) and the layman alike have decried the new logo and have made it very public that they kind of don’t care for it. On their Facebook page, a spokesperson has said, in that very special brand of PR speak, that they’re “so excited” that everyone has taken such “passionate” stances on the new logo and are welcoming customer submissions.

While I won’t go into specifics on the merits of the new logo, I wanted to touch briefly on this movement I’ve been seeing on many websites talking about it: that this is a heavily orchestrated PR stunt for the Gap.

I think it’s very cynical to believe that the Gap had deliberately made a bad logo just to then outsource it to the customer. There’s a level of ridiculousness that I just can’t believe a company would allow. While on the one hand, it feels like that idea has some legs: the Gap is positioning itself as a brand of the people, so much so that the people themselves have decided how the brand should look. Customers will see this new user generated logo and think “I did that. I helped the Gap make an important decision. That’s my company.”

But that’s just it – a logo should tell the customer what the company is all about, not the other way around. And how would you feel if that was your brand? Who wants a company – especially a fashion brand – that sets a precedent that it is unconfident, that says “Please like us! We’ll do anything!”.

I can’t get behind this notion of bad publicity as good publicity. I’m more inclined to believe that this logo was a concept that accidentally got pushed to the website and garnered more attention than the Gap was hoping.

Though as one commenter on the Creative Review blog noted, it seems nothing is sacred in advertising…