New Gap Logo Out, Old Gap Logo Back In

Looks like all the fuss about the Gap's new Helvetica bold logo—which was uniformly despised and then cleverly applied, by a friend of ours, to 10 of the world's most recognizable logos—has resulted in a take-back. Gap has announced that they're going back to the original.

From the horse's mouth:

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“At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels.

“In the meantime, the website will go back to our iconic blue box logo and, for Holiday, we’ll turn our blue box red for our seasonal campaign.

“We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community. This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing.

“There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way. “

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What's the takeaway? Gap reads Twitter and pays attention to blogs; it cares what people—designers and the rest of us—think; and it realizes it cannot pop into crowdsourcing logo art as an experiment without doing it properly.

But if they try again, and they're willing to pay the price for the design, I think crowdsourcing can be a fun way for a brand as iconic and established as the Gap to update itself, no?