[logo] Uber's New Look Is Very Nice, Thank You.

3251.

Contrary to what you may have heard, Uber hasn't changed its logo. It's changed its logotype. The old icon, with the U in the square, has been ashcanned; but in an attempt to portray it as the serious, grown up company it sees itself as, the wordmark has been beefified.

Basically, they've tightened the tracking, eliminated the curly bits, and put some fillets into the joints while making some of the terminals more like a chisel. You know, so as to generate some disruption, or excitement, or something. Does it move you? Make your own decision; a graphic comparing the old (top) to the new (bottom) can be seen at right. EXCITEMENT! I'm feelin' it.

The U-icon has been eliminated from the app. You'll see one of two things if you use Uber; users will see a circle with a square in the center and a line connecting the square to the edge of the circle; the drivers ("partners") will see a square in the middle of a hexagon with lines extending up and down to the perimeter of the hex. Each one of these is on a background with a fine tracery of lines whose colors are drawn from a palette inspired by each city in which Uber uberates … er, operates. The center square is called the 'bit', and the outer shape is called the 'atom', because Uber is a place where bits and atoms come together, or maybe they just meet kind of awkwardly.

The entire whale-song and joss stick sonata can be seen in Uber's newsroom, if one is so inclined, but for sheer commentary value, my favorite remark so far is at the end of this article at The Next Web:

Again, this all comes via an update, and is a rebranding effort; nothing about your Uber experience has changed, which may be the biggest oversight.

Oh, snap, you.

[logo] JCPenney's New Old Logo … Back To The Future

3009.

Forward, into the past … just quietly. Easy does it. Back away from the new-style logo change and marketing approach and nobody gets hurt. We'll not talk about this again.

JCPenney is returning to its roots in Helvetica, it would seem. It will be recalled that, back in 2011, they spiffed up their logo to an all-miniscule version that I reviewed positively (and still like). Not long after, in 2012, they changed it to a strange-looking square with an empty middle that carried the JCP trigram in the corner like the union of the US flag. While I appreciated the boldness of the approach, I didn't care too much for the design … I thought the 2011 redesign had nailed it.

In the time since, much has happened at the store once known as The Golden Rule. A new CEO was brought in, Ron Johnson, who had a ton of New Ideas™. Ironically, the same man who'd worked magic at the Apple Store and Target pancaked so hard that to say he merely 'failed' would be gilding the lily, kinda sorta.

Business schools, I'm sure,  are still trying to quantify the degree of fail hard that happened here. The new 'stores within stores', the ending of sales to favor uniformly low prices, all sorts of issues … they not only didn't attract a new constituency, they apparently nearly completely alienated the old one.

So, monumentally, he's out. And, it happens, a lot of the stuff that he tried to do died with him. Some, right away, some others, more slowly. Like the new graphical attitude. I did note, when he flamed out, a lot of that went pretty quickly. Some lingered. The website took a long time to change, but, when I heard that Penney's is rejiggering its store constellation – losing some 33 stores nationwide out of about 1,100 and losing 2,000 employees … it occurred to me that I might take a look at the website.

And here's what I found:

There's the old look. Which wasn't a really bad look, after all; the use of Helvetica and a very simple wordmark kerned hard and just-so proves at least one thing; Helvetica is a timeless font and, at least in the JCPenney context, rather a timeless look.

As Hurricane Ron Johnson impacted, Penney's went from hubris through nemesis to catharsis in what must be record time for American business. Returning to its own past is a smart thing to do here … Penney's may have had an image problem, as far as some might have said. But it wasn't being accused of not working for it.

[logo] The Gap Is Back

2508.The old Gap logo, that is. Confirming rumor I've heard on Twitter ever since the entire visual arts community did an amazing Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and the Gap acknowledged that the new logo was not intended as some sort of bizarre social marketing joint, cool heads prevailed (they do that sometimes) and restored the classic Gap logo:

Marka Hansen, Gap North America president, informed the company's marketing department this afternoon of the change, acknowledging that the switch was a mistake and that the company would be tabling any changes for the foreseeable future.

One New Coke moment for the record books.

Read all about it at AdvertisingAge: http://adage.com/article?article_id=146417

Technorati Tags: The Gap, Gap Logo, New Gap Logo, New Coke Moments

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[logo] Mind The Gap Logo

2506.

Today was the day that far-flung clothing retailer Gap pulled themselves a Tropicana.

Some time ago I commented on a brand redesign that Tropicana - the OJ people - tried. It was a strong effort, thought out and executed well (see: http://zehnkatzen.blogspot.com/2009/03/tropicana-oj-redesign-fail-brand.html) but it had the fatal flaw that nobody really could have seen: Tropicana's customers were so fond of the straw-in-orange, which had become iconic without being noticed, you'd of thought that Tropicana had killed a family member in cold blood.

Well, today (or perhaps yesterday) Gap rolled out its own brand redesign with no apparent fanfare, having the new logo up on its website with little or no announcement. For review, here's the "old" Gap:

... and here's the new one:

Okay, by now (and especially if you've found the discussion on Twitter) you know that this got a lot of feedback, most of it negative, and a good portion of that snarky. And, in moves that have already gotten tiresome, two anonymous Twitterers have debuted accounts (@GapLogo and @OldGapLogo) that spoof the whole thing by personifying the each logos reaction to comments made about them.

I'm not a customer of Gap; I have no emotional capital invested in them. but it's said that two years time has been invested in refreshing the logo, and honestly, I can't see why they bothered. The new Gap logo isn't a bad one, it actually does the job a logo ought to, but when I look at it, I don't see the mature brand Gap is ... I see a new clothing store just starting out.

At the very least, I didn't see the Gap's old logo as an identity in need of that much of a refresh. Gap's old logo was a very classic design, and by this I mean classic in the good way, the way Wayfarers never go out of style or the little black dress is a staple of every woman's wardrobe.

And saying that Gap "pulled a Tropicana" is actually a little unfair on Tropicana, in as much as they tried to transition to a strong, designed and fresh update. The new Gap logo looks kind of like it's Microsoft Word WordArt. About the biggest emotion I can summon for it is a "meh".

When I think of a company that has resisted the urge to change its logo for a very long time because it makes sense, I think actually of JCPenney. Before 1971, "Penney's" had a kind of a spacey, jet-age, logo. In 1971, however, it changed to a simple, extremely minimal, light Helvetica treatment of the name in a simple red square (see right).  It's stayed that way ever since, 40 years almost, and despite that age it doesn't seem as dated as the pre-71 logo did when they changed. it has a timeless quality that kind of puts it beyond century-and-decade. They'd be foolish to change it.

Of course, when the company's reaction to the reaction is to tip its cap to its many critics and then open a page on Facebook to act as a crowdsourcing for a hoped-for even better version of a new logo ... well, you've just got to wonder what's going on. But, no matter how you feel about it, you can go to a site like http://craplogo.me and generate your own Gapified logo.

Or, if you have Photoshop or Illustrator (or Gimp or Inkscape ... or MSWord) just lay down a few letters of bold Helvetica or Arial, stick a gradated square behind, and there ya are.

Technorati Tags: Gap, Gap Logo, New Gap Logo, Gap Logo Redesign, Logo Redesign, Logo Redesign FAIL

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