Tag: apparel

Personal attire; clothing

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Urban Outfitters’ new “branding”

Urban Outfitters websiteHot on the heels of the Gap’s infamous lazy logo redesign (since withdrawn) comes another epic fail, Urban Outfitters. Usually reliable for being ahead of trends in clothing design, merchandising and communication, the apparel giant unveiled a clunky new look for its logo and website. The logo is a masterpiece of asymmetry and plainness, while the website’s sidebar navigation willfully mixes extended and condensed typefaces. Many critics have cited the logo’s similarity with Word Art examples found inside Microsoft’s Office suite, enabling amateurs everywhere to curve and bend type to create their own corporate logotype.

I would bet that by year’s end there will be an “emergency” logo design revamp, because this dog won’t hunt!

UPDATE
Since this was posted, UO has changed to a similarly bizarre branding scheme—at least for its website. This time round, clearly the same retail marketing team are conjuring 1991 with all its dots and squiggles. What do you think? Leave a comment below…
—Scott

Urban Outfitters 2013 home page

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Sanctuary screen printing in Austin

South Side Sanctuary El CaminoIn a warehouse in South Austin, the talented artists of South Side Sanctuary toil away on their computers and at their presses creating fashion that comments on art, music and fashion itself. Leaders Jon Pattillo and Jed Taylor do this for fun, cranking out three to five thousand t-shirts per month of their own design. But their designs are anything but mass-produced. Services also include custom designed screen-printed t-shirts, letter press-printed posters and business cards, banners, murals, and stickers. The duo started out creating merch for a record label and its touring bands. Today the company is housed in a 5,000 square foot location on South Congress Avenue. In addition to the three screen printing presses, SSS operates a 1947 Kluge open-face letterpress.

During this past year’s SXSW festival, the SSS crew could be seen rolling around town in their super-rad 1979 El Camino “delivery vehicle” equipped with a working screenprinting press in the truck bed.