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Four notorious logo redesign fails

A logo is the symbol that consumers most closely associate with your brand. It’s on packaging for every product, has pride of place on your company’s print advertising campaigns, and features heavily in all of your printed marketing materials. A logo is only one part of a good brand, but it’s the part that matters the most. A poor logo is simply off-putting. Of course, it’s tricky to design a winning logo right off the bat. Even the best logos need to be refined or tweaked over time to reflect changing target markets and the new products and services that the company offers. However, total redesigns are dangerous, regardless of whether your company operates only locally or is a large multinational. Here are some logo redesigns that didn’t exactly have a fantastic reception when they debuted…

 

Animal Planet

Sure, Animal Planet’s old logo wasn’t fantastic to begin with, with a garish font and the blue-white of the globe making the colours rather messy, but the redesign made it a whole lot worse. The distinctive silhouette of the elephant against the green background was removed entirely. Instead, we got a whole load of capital letters, one of which was (almost inexplicably) turned on its side. The logo looks amateur. The text isn’t easy to read, and it’s taken a step away from actually portraying what the TV channel does. The logo looks slightly improved when the green text is switched for black text – the M that’s fallen over does almost give the appearance of zebra stripes – but it’s still a horror.

 

Lesson: Make text clear and easy to read. Don’t implement it in your design unless you can guarantee this.

 

Gap

The most infamous logo redesign of all time occurred in 2010. Gap, the clothing retailer, unveiled a complete change to its classic logo. The font was updated to a sans serif typeface, in order to look less antiquated, and the blue square was moved to the top right corner of the logo, behind the edge of the ‘p.’ Gap wanted it to look modern and slick, but consumers hated it. The old Gap logo was practically iconic, but the public piled ridicule on the redesign, calling it tacky and ordinary. The change was reversed less than a week after the logo was revealed. The costly redesign was wasted.

 

Lesson: Don’t make drastic changes to logos, particularly if you’re in B2C. Instead, iterate to avoid a negative response.

 

MySpace

The past decade has been a bit of a rollercoaster for MySpace. It was the king of social media, with its messy profiles and interface quickly usurped by some young pretender called Facebook (I wonder what happened to that?). As it tried to clean up the site to appeal to the Facebook generation, MySpace switched to a cleaner, black-and-white colour scheme in 2010. This included a new logo – the word ‘my’ followed by a literal space. The logo was certainly distinct, and rather clever. The designers claimed that it reflected the name of the site and also it’s purpose – for it to become a personal space for each of its users. However, the design failed to prevent the drastic decline in the site’s audience, and designers bemoaned this blatant attempt to try and be down with the kids.

Lesson: Be clever, but not pretentious.

 

London 2012

During the bidding process for the 2012 Olympics, the London team used a fairly inoffensive logo – simply the word London and the number 2012 with a rainbow ribbon swirling through each letter. It was functional, but not flashy or distinctive enough to use at the event itself. That meant a redesign. However, the logo, once it was unveiled, received nearly universal derision. The jumble of garish jagged geometric shapes would look more at home on shell suits rather than splashed across the world’s TV screens during the most important international sporting event.

 

Lesson: Seek the opinions of others before going ahead with a drastic redesign.

 

If you want to create a distinctive logo that won’t get ridiculed by the public or refresh your current logo to attract new customers, the experts at our design studio are happy to help!

 

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