What I Learned This Year: Michael Gatti

We asked the most respected creative visionaries in Boston to create a piece, entitled "What I Learned This Year."

Here's what Michael Gatti, Creative Director at The Barbarian Group had to say.

What I’ve learned this year.

2010 was the year of identity crises. No one was immune: fledgling newcomers were put to the coals as hard as their middle aged establishment-type peers, and very few came out unscathed. Mainly I learned that, in the same way you can’t return from a “spa retreat” with a significantly diminished proboscis and expect everyone to play along, neither can you revamp a well-known brand logo and expect the Twitterverse, Blogosphere, or greater Interwebs to be silent about it. Under such immense pressure, there are several ways to play your response. Here are a few of my favorites from this year:

Cave like a Chilean mine.
It took Gap all of six days of merciless Internet ridicule to abandon their new logo, presumably five days, twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes longer than they spent designing it in the first place.

Speak your customers’ language.
I know everyone calls it “The Y”, but does this mean Christian men are no longer welcome to associate there?

Ignore the criticism. Loudly.
“We disagree” is how Steve Jobs responded to one critic of the new iTunes logo. “…asshole” is presumably how that sentence would have continued.

Accept your limitations, and embrace them.
MTV realized that if it’s been years since you were in the business of showing music on television, it’s probably time to remove “music television” from your logo.

…but know when to stop.
Just because you’re Starbucks’ bland, adopted brother doesn’t mean you need to look like it.

Let your product speak for itself.
It may not be the hit of design blogs, but as long as Comedy Central continues to crank out The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Futurama, and South Park, I’d say it doesn’t really matter.

Launch a preemptive strike.
This redesign might be the best $5 Urban Outfitters ever spent.