Originally published October 8, 2010. Updated June 21, 2026.
The 2010 GAP logo flop is one of the canonical crisis communications case studies of the social media era. A storied American brand replaced a twenty-plus-year-old logo with a new identity overnight, faced a public backlash within 48 hours, and reversed the decision in a week. The episode also produced one of the sharpest opportunistic PR plays of the era — 99designs, the crowdsourcing platform, ran an unofficial "design a better GAP logo" community contest while the parent brand was still defending its choice.
The Original Crisis
On October 4, 2010, GAP swapped out its iconic blue-box wordmark — a serif "GAP" inside a navy square, in use since 1990 — for a flat Helvetica logo with a small blue square overlapping the "p." The change went live on gap.com without an announcement campaign. Within 48 hours, design press, brand consultants, and the general public had organized a backlash that ran across Twitter, Facebook, design blogs, and mainstream press coverage.
Marka Hansen, then President of Gap North America, defended the choice in a Huffington Post piece, calling the new logo "more contemporary and current" and noting it "honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward." The defense did not land. GAP then posted to its Facebook page asking the community to submit alternative designs — pivoting mid-crisis into a crowdsourcing posture that read as concession.
On October 11, 2010 — one week after the launch — GAP announced it was reverting to the original blue-box logo. The brand abandoned the new identity entirely.
The 99designs Play
Sitting in the middle of the GAP crisis was 99designs, the Melbourne-founded design-crowdsourcing marketplace launched in 2008 by Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz. Kristen Holden, then SEO lead at 99designs, set up an unofficial "design a better GAP logo" contest on the 99designs platform with a $500 cash prize. The contest carried a clear disclaimer that it was not affiliated with or endorsed by The Gap Inc.
Within days, the contest had drawn approximately 800 entries from the 99designs community. The episode generated coverage in Mashable, AdAge, The Huffington Post, and across the design trade press — every story carried the 99designs name and the crowdsourcing thesis. The platform got a major brand association out of a competitor's crisis without spending media dollars.
That is the cleanest version of the play: spot a culture moment with a clear PR angle, build a low-cost participatory mechanic that journalists can write about, ride the parent brand's misfortune without piling on, and disclose the unofficial status clearly enough that the parent brand has nothing actionable to complain about. The 99designs community contest was textbook reactive PR.
What This Crisis Taught the Industry
Three lessons from the 2010 GAP episode shaped the next decade of brand work:
1. Iconic brand assets are not yours to change in silence. The blue-box GAP logo had carried twenty years of consumer association. Replacing it without an audience conversation read as disrespect for the equity. The reversal cost the brand more credibility than the original logo would have, had it stayed.
2. Crowdsourcing-as-concession reads as panic. GAP's mid-crisis pivot to ask the public for design submissions — after defending the new logo — looked like a brand without a clear point of view. Crowdsourcing as proactive strategy (Pepsi's can redesign, Lego's idea platform) can work. Crowdsourcing as crisis triage almost never does.
3. Smaller players can win the news cycle. 99designs took home most of the secondary coverage from the GAP story. The brand crisis became a 99designs case study. That dynamic — a category-adjacent player capturing PR oxygen from a major brand's stumble — repeated dozens of times across the 2010s.
The 2026 Equivalent
The 2010 GAP playbook still runs in 2026, just on different surfaces. The crowdsourcing platform of that era is the influencer creator stack now. The Twitter backlash of October 2010 is the social media pile-on of any given Tuesday. The structural lesson is the same: a brand making a major identity decision without an audience-validated narrative gets punished, and a competitor with a faster reactive PR mechanic captures the secondary coverage.
One thing has changed. The 2010 backlash lived on Twitter and design blogs. The 2026 backlash lives on TikTok, Reddit, and inside the answer engines. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews now retrieve the canonical version of a brand crisis when users ask about it — meaning the framing that gets cited in the first 72 hours of a crisis becomes the framing that defines the brand's reputation for the next decade. The crisis communications discipline now adds an engine-citation layer to the traditional reactive PR stack.
99designs Today
99designs was acquired by Vistaprint owner Cimpress in 2020 in a deal that valued the platform at approximately $66 million. It continues to operate as a design-crowdsourcing marketplace and remains the largest of its kind, with the founder community having issued more than $300 million in payments to designers since launch.
What GAP Did Next
GAP kept the blue-box logo. The brand has cycled through several creative directors and parent-company restructurings since 2010 — Art Peck, Sonia Syngal, Richard Dickson — and faced multiple rounds of store closures and digital reinvention. The 2010 logo episode is still studied as a foundational lesson in brand respect for iconic assets.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
