[ryanwaggoner]

I researched your customers. Talked to a variety of them, in fact. Asked them not only about The Gap, but about their own lives. Their needs. Anxieties. Their thoughts on the future. I took all that into account.

I also interviewed employees in a few of your stores. (They’re quite dedicated, you know.) I asked them how they felt about the company and about their interactions with customers. Because customer service may actually be the most important part of your brand. And the logo’s job is simply to help evoke those pleasant experiences.

Does anyone else find this pretentious? I somehow doubt that most of the world's biggest brands have logos that came about through this process, or at least are measurably different than they would have been if a talented designer came up with something that felt right and looked good.

http://www.murdercapers.com/corporate/companyLogos/CompanyLo...

I bet a lot of those are just variations on the original logo of the company when it was started. Maybe I'm completely wrong though; just seems like if you'd expect anyone to think that designing a new logo should include hundreds of hours and dozens or hundreds of customer and marketing surveys, it would be a branding firm who wants to charge you for all that. I'm not sure anyone else would be able to tell the difference between a logo that came from that process and one that came from a few hours of a great designer throwing out ideas.

[prawn]

It's not pretentious, it's just what happens with a big budget rebrand. I don't know if I can explain my take on all this that well, but I'll try: You can either do something at one level, playing off gut-feel/fairly safe assumptions and get it 80% right, or spend 10 times as much, do research and maybe get it 95% right.

That said, in an argument, designers will talk about all those lovely theoretical things they were trained to do. Then, most of them will just sit down and muck around with fonts, shapes, etc until they have something that fits the bill.

Same is often true with web design (my gig). You can use your experience, gut, etc to create a $10k site, or you could spend $100k to get something not miles dissimilar but involving actual usability testing (instead of gut feel decisions), buckets of documentation, etc. You could spend $100k on a single page microsite if you wanted to take everything to the extreme with endless focus groups, eye-tracking tests, etc. Or you could just put the branding in the top left, use buttons that look like buttons, remember what worked from last time you did some A/B tests, make the text legible, etc.

It's a funny game. Most of the time I estimate/quote by rolling dice rather than spending hours trying to guess the budget of a client or the level of polish they want to pay for with a site.

[proexploit]

I think it's inaccurate to say most designer's work process is to "just sit down and muck around with fonts, shapes, etc until they have something that fits the bill". Of course design is a process but all those "lovely theoretical things" tell you where to start. If you're quoting by rolling the dice, you're not quoting effectively.

[prawn]

I don't want to truly trivialise it, but I imagine a lot of it is brainstorming, thinking, and gut feel than direct conversations with customers, market research, etc.

And I have to disagree on the dice. The best situation is a client giving me their budget and me telling them the best way to spend it (often, not all of it). So, when the budget is not disclosed, instead of spending hours trying to guess their pricepoint, I just randomise the approach and then fill that budgeted time in the best way possible.

[jrwoodruff]

I thought this was going to be an article bashing designers, I kept waiting for the punch line. I understand what he's saying, but it comes across very pretentious. And I say that as a designer.

[ataggart]

Three words:

Pepsi Gravitational Field

[yankeeracer73]

In most re-branding efforts I've seen at companies of Gap's size, they absolutely do go through this process - some to discover new things, but also as risk mitigation. Right now I suspect the firm that did this new logo is on conference calls with Gap people to say wait, we did the studies and they said xyz, we know that any change to your iconic brand was going to be received negatively, etc.

But more importantly, it's not just logo that changes when you re-brand, it's product labels, business cards, web sites, stationary, building signage, color palette, EVERYTHING. So actually, you could spend a few k on a new brand with a quality designer, or spec out a logo for a few hundred on crowdspring, and frankly that's all most smaller companies need, but for a larger company like Gap, a re-branding ends up being a huge investment, so the research makes them feel more comfortable in making the decisions on how to move forward.

[momotomo]

I think he's using a bit of hyperbole and sarcasm against the processes that would actually be conducted. As per other feedback - all of the activities presented here are pretty reasonable for a decent design project. He's just added a bit of snark to fit the context of the response.

It also ties in with other items here re: Design <> photoshop. Creating a graphic is to design what fitting a tyre is to performance motorsport - an element, an important one, but hardly the entire scope of what goes into it.

[jstibbards]

I found it a little sarcastic; even snarky.