Gap Kills Their Bland New Logo, Anyone Else?: If Everyone Jumped

Less than a week after rolling out a new, bland, Helvetica meets clip art logo, Gap has reverted to their previous (and more well known) design.  The backtracking comes after an uproar online over the new logo forced company president Marka Hansen to defend the new logo, before finally acknowledging that the change wasn’t a great move for business. {Styleite}

On one hand, we give credit to companies that understand they have to keep up with the times. On the other, when you have a logo that’s been around as long as the Gap’s has, why trade it all in for yet another Helvetica logo?

But in all the furor over Gap’s new (now old) logo, you may have missed out on another logo competing in the “you paid how much for that?” rebranding category.

In case you haven’t been there in a few years, let us reintroduce you to MySpace. {TechCrunch} You remember them, right? They’re the social network which got dethroned by that other social network, currently  having a Hollywood moment. Given that MySpace’s old logo hasn’t been able to encourage enough nostalgia to keep users from abandoning the site for Facebook, rebranding makes a bit more sense here. Plus, the old logo wasn’t really that great, so what have they got to lose?

5 letters apparently. When users left the site, perhaps they took some letters along with them. Call it the equivalent of leaving with office supplies when you leave a job. The positives: at least they didn’t use Helvetica (a lovely font, really, but overused). The negatives: everything else. While we’re sure using a line to represent a space sounded like a cute idea in theory, it fails in practice.

As a promotional campaign, perhaps it works. As a logo, we get that MySpace wants to represent a network that everyone can make into their own thing, but it could also represent the vast amount of space from all of the users migrating to Facebook. Or the uncertainty of how to reclaim any of their former glory. Any ideas? Fill in the blank.