DESIGNpebble

It looks like GAP have semi-caved to public oppinion of the new logo and are now back-tracking somewhat.

GAP have created a facebook post inviting anyone who thinks they can design a better logo for them to have a go and although they haven’t explicitely stated that they will be changing the logo again, they are quick to say:

“We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas.”

Interesting indeed. Now either this is a VERY cunning plan by GAP to release a poor brand identity to spark conversation and generate buzz, be it good or bad, and then reveal a much better logo via “crowd-sourcing”; or they have acknowledged that they have failed in the rebranding and are now trying to surreptitiously undo the mistake that I’m sure they are aware they have made.

Whatever the motives for this whole debaucle, it is clear that there is a lot of discussion going on at the moment, and GAP are generating a LOT of strong oppinions on a company that a lot of people may have otherwise been uninterested in. It’s always fun to mock the failings of multi-national companies, especially when it comes to desgin, isn’t it.

Above, you can see my entry into the fun, I urge you to create your own and submit them, if only to try and get the horrible current logo off the site.

With one simple change, GAP has managed to destroy the instantly recognisable brand that they had built for themselves.

The new logo is as far removed from the original as can be, favouring a Sans-serif font (Helvetica) over the original and highly identifiable  Serif font, The bold blue background has now been shrunk and a gradient added for who-knows what reason, most likely to look “trendy” and “cool” when in reality it makes the logo look more like a software company, I can’t believe someone got payed to create something so uninspired.

For example, take the new logo completely out of context, put it on a white background and ask someone to tell you what they think the company sells… See the problem? Granted the original logo didn’t have any identifiers, and for anyone not in the know, saying what GAP sells would be a challenge, but they already had brand awareness. The new logo now has to start re-building that awareness.

I don’t think this will kill GAP completely, far from it. It will probably do what it was designed for and inject the brand into the more trend aware marketplace. I am just disappointed to see such a strong original identity be swept aside so crassly and replaced by what is in my opinion, a VERY poorly designed and thought out new logo. Ho-hum.

“Justice. Revenge. Conviction”, The tag line says it all. In Splinter Cell: Conviction you reprise the role of Sam Fisher; a rogue agent determined to piece together the circumstances of his daughter’s death.

Following on from Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Sam Fisher (voiced by Hollywood Hardman Michael Ironside) has now left Third Echelon, the government agency he’d formerly been a part of after discovering hints that his daughter’s death may not have been an accident. Before long, Sam becomes wrapped up in a much larger plot involving a potential terrorist attack on Washington DC. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Bruttino Arrives

Originally uploaded by shtev21

Someone very special to me gave me the chance to adopt Bruttino.

I love him, he’s so cute. I will be updating my Flickr with photos of him exploring my world.

Another quick post using, well… QuickPost.

This time it’s a photo post! One of my older pics from Camden.

Camden – Peppermint Tea

Seems like I’ve found something that MAY do the job I was looking for. It comes with a bookmarklet for firefox that enables quick posting of links to the blog (it’s not perfect) But also mentions quick uploading of other simple bits and bobs, much like Tumblr does.

Hopefully it is what I want, I’ll try it for a month and see.

If you are interested in trying it out, you can click the link below and download it yourself.

WordPress Plugin – QuickPost

People may have noticed that I update my blog far less than I do my twitter status. This got me thinking.

If there was a way to add a quick post to wordpress, I would love it. A couple of dropdowns or input boxes for standard things such as location, food or custom, I would be extremely happy. I MAY look into creating something like this myself. No promises tho.

Out.

Testing out the embeddable Tweets from Twitter.

Here is a post from the PoliceOracle twitter feed:

Looking pretty good!

Not only is it pretty slick, but I also used the BlackBird bookmarklet (available here) to quickly and easily generate the code used within the blog post. Only one slight problem with the new embeddable tweets is the fact that the generated code “snippet” is huge and messy, but they are working hard to improve that.

Overall im quite pleased and it will definately be a boon to hardcore bloggers who regularly post screenshots of twitter stusses.

For some bizarre reason, my most trafficked post and also (probably related) most spammed post happens to be my Macro photos post. I guess no-one is actually interested in my photos and would much rather encourage me to forget my camera and lengthen my penis instead. Ho-hum )

Finally got shot of my old 8gb iPhone 3g, well, not completely; I’m still looking to sell it and may even go as far as sending it to mazuma.

I am now part of the Android family with my Motorola Milestone (t-mobile contract; bought from expansys) and it has made me incredibly happy, the phone simply does everything I want it to, its very fast, multi tasks well and has a good battery life. Not to mention the seemless sync with my Google account.

I actually find it a pleasure to type on the physical keyboard and actively seek opportunities to type with it. It took a bit of getting used to but I think I finally have it.

Well, this turned out to be a fairly lengthy post to type from a phone, but a decent test.