GapCopied

For more than two decades Gap's logo was the blue box: tall, narrow serif capitals in white on a navy square. In the first week of October 2010 it changed on gap.com with no announcement. The new logo set the name as Gap, in black Helvetica and upper and lower case, and shrank the blue box to a small gradient square tucked behind the p. Word of it started circulating on 6 October.

The logo was designed by Trey Laird and his New York agency Laird and Partners, Gap's long-time creative directors, working with Marka Hansen, president of Gap North America. Bill Chandler, Gap's vice president of corporate communications, told Co.Design that Helvetica was not new to the brand, which had used it in advertising and some stores for the past year. "We believe this is a more contemporary, modern expression," he said. "The only nod to the past is that there's still a blue box, but it looks forward." The new logo was meant for the holiday campaign and a larger rebrand in 2011.

The reaction was immediate and almost entirely negative. Gap first defended the design on Facebook, "We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we're thrilled to see passionate debate unfolding", and then invited people to send in their own designs in what it called a crowdsourcing project. That annoyed designers even more. More than a thousand negative comments landed on Gap's Facebook page, a parody account called @GapLogo started tweeting, and Gawker added the logo to a list of branding's greatest misses.

On the evening of 11 October Gap gave up. "O.K.," its Facebook post began. "We've heard loud and clear that you don't like the new logo." A statement from Hansen followed: "All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we've made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further." She added that the company "did not go about this in the right way" and that "this wasn't the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing." The crowdsourcing project was dropped, the blue box came back across all channels, and, Gap noted, it would turn red for the holiday campaign.

The redesign lasted about as long as a return window, and it is still the standard cautionary tale about quietly changing a logo people are attached to. The new mark was not a disaster on its own terms, just generic: Helvetica plus a square could have been anyone. The blue box could only ever be Gap, which is exactly why customers wanted it back.