Why the New Gap Logo was Awesome

Ok, so not the logo itself. I'm not an idiot who thinks it was a well-designed logo or that crowdsourcing is healthy for the design community. Let's just dispense with that whole faction of this debate right now.

There's a another side of this debacle I'd like to explore instead.

I posit that we've all fallen into a trap by getting enraged about Gap's new logo and how much it sucked. Why? Because that's exactly what they wanted us to do.

Any press is good press, right? Well, in this social-media-ridden world where every two-bit wonk has his own soapbox, that phrase should now read: "any trending topic is a good trending topic."

The logo not only had Gap trending for weeks, but it inspired so much passionate vitriol that someone even built a web application to allow you to "crap" your own logo. These logos spread to people's Facebook and Twitter avatars, blogs, web sites. I'm just waiting for "Gap Logo Sucks Freeze-Dried Donkey Bollucks," the song. The t-shirt. The TV mini-series. Jeez, enough already.

How many web applications were built in honor of the original Gap logo?

Exactly.

I can't prove that Gap (and Laird & Partners) intentionally duped the social media community into talking about (almost nothing but) their astoundingly shitty logo for weeks.

Perhaps it was a happy accident for Gap. Perhaps it was a bit more Machiavellian than that.  We may never know. But one thing is indisputable: it worked.

And we were duped.

And that was awesome.