New! Yahoo! logo! shows! Marissa! Meyer's! personal! touch! After 18 years the Yahoo! logo has had a redesign, courtesy of newish boss Marissa Mayer and her team, who spent a weekend hammering out the new look for the company. New Yahoo! logo Behold Marissa's new creation! "On a personal level, I love brands, logos, color, design, and, most of all, Adobe Illustrator," Mayer wrote …
monkeyfish,
Are you sure all those exclamation marks are at exactly 9°? If not, you're going to be in real trouble!
I used to work for a US multi-national. I needed to put our logo on a template document, and along with the logos received the 21 page document explaining how to use it. Along with all the rules about colours, borders and backgrounds the logo must always be at exactly 19° - it never said why...
I've had a drink so there's a good chance this is wrong.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
.yahootext
{
float: left;
}
.yahooexclamation
{
float: right;
transform:rotate(9deg);
-ms-transform:rotate(9deg); /* IE 9 */
-webkit-transform:rotate(9deg); /* Safari and Chrome */
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="yahootext">YAHOO<div class="yahooexclamation">!</div></div>
</body>
</html>
The old logo reflected a young slightly flippant corporation. This one is a like stodgy middle-aged parent trying to be cool but too afraid to let loose.
Yahoo! has made such a mess of its UI changes .. profiles, Mail, Flickr (grrrrr) Groups.. why would anyone expect them to leave the logo alone.
"If this all sounds like marketing bollocks, that's because to a large extent it is. Very few users will look at the newly angled exclamation point and think "Gosh, what whimsy! Back in your box Oscar Wilde!" But to a certain kind of mind it's very important."
It doesn't matter if the user isn't spending an age inspecting every small detail of the logo. It's the overall impression that it gives that is important. Ultimately that overall impression is made up of the small details.
That said, with all those vertical lines the exclamation point just looks... wrong.
That's a busy page o' stuff. Not the fastest to load either, for some reason... I guess I shouldn't be surprised. We keep an old legacy BT email address, from before the company had a domain, and every so often I have to log into Yahoo Mail in order to unbreak it. Boy is that site a hideous ever-changing mess, where they seem to have pages and pages of news stories, half-dressed models and adverts, but hide the inbox button in ever smaller more out-of-the-way places. Actually a quick check shows they seem to have cleaned it up somewhat. So I assume that 6 months ago the Yahoo! main page must have been much worse too. Nice.
" She murder the last thing I found useful. Yahoo groups. I closed my flickr account."
Flickr has become impossible to use for browsing pictures. I visit about once every two weeks. It takes about 5 seconds to establish that they haven't abandoned the "improvements" - so immediately quit the site.
Yahoo Groups web interface has also lost one of its important content features.Previously a non-RichText posting would present a URL as a clickable link. Now you have to cut and paste to follow the URL.
This post has been deleted by its author
Wow I swore I had that same exact font they used like 20 years ago. So they used a font then changed the size of the last O... And that took a weekend?
I swear this world is doomed with the piddly shit that millions of dollars are wasted on.
Also I'm so mad at yahoo my mother uses them for e-mail, and I keep getting called every friggin day now that they changed that piece of shit cause the damn thing doesn't work right as half the time the buttons don't even load right. I think I might just move her to gmail(yes I know but they don't screw things up as bad)... Looking at what Marisa has done to Yahoo I think I now know why she never got promoted past a certain point at Google.
This new logo is going to look far better on the "flat design" type of site that's becoming the norm. The old one was a tad too busy in that context. For the most part, this logo seems to look ridiculous on the yahoo home page - all the proportions and styles are wrong - it's obvious the page wasn't designed around it.
BUT - it looks pretty stylish in other contexts, especially with the inverted colours - I quite like it here: http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com
I kind of like the old logo.
That said, I am fascinated by the design process and the details, though I don't really care for the 'waisted' look in lettering.
Looking at the way it was designed and the reasons, it's interesting and quite clever but just another example of design-by-committee - something that almost always ends up looking like it was designed by, well, a committee...
While on the complete other end of the spectrum (boring and safe), it reminds me of the London 2012 marketing - the logo and those horrid characters. Everything was chosen to signify something or other that some stakeholder though was important and the result is an unfocused mess.
On the Yahoo! logo, specifically, it's not a good sign. When a company starts with an 'edgy' logo in its youth and then later, once it has grown, changes the log to something that 'references' the old one, it's a pretty sure indication that said company is no longer young, edgy or dynamic.
This story reminds me of a news report last week about Fred "The Shred" Goodwin. The trauma of the collapse of RBS was ascribed to his obsession with minutiae rather than managing the big picture.
The story used to illustrate it was that a man with a broom was seen sweeping outside the front door of his previous bank's headquarters of which he was the then boss. Apparently Fred's mother had rung him to say that there was a discarded cigarette butt on the pavement - so he interrupted his meeting to order a cleaner to be dispatched.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/fiddling-while-rbs-burned--new-book-reveals-fred-the-shred-goodwins-fatal-obsessions-8795202.html
"they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better"
Ouch, my brain just exploded.
Granted, as a designer, I spend lots of time with clients hashing out which colors work on a logo or "identity" piece, but, still... their search engine is shit, their Web site is shit, their new groups/email interface is shit, the company's circling the drain, and Little Marissa is babbling about which shade of blue "performs better"?
Cripes, somebody tie me to a railroad track.
...with twenty years' combined experience with FreeHand and Illustrator, and another ten years pre-digital -- that's got to be the most mundane, boring-assed logo I've ever seen, and I've seen lots of boring-assed shit in my time.
What's worse is all the banal babbling coming out of Little Marissa. Referring to that load of horseshit as "marketing bollocks" gives the term "bollocks" a bad name.
It might have taken the collective brains of Yahoo's leaders to invent this, likely aided by a few style consultants who actually knew what they were doing, but the real cost is likely to be in the millions, especially if they throw out all the old notepaper and update all their computer programs.
MS Mayer may now retire,knowing she has made a lasting contribution to the company!
Optima was far too bland a choice. To be fair I quite like the font and was very sad when Wimbledon dropped it from their scoreboards for the hideous-ness of Arial, but the lines are too thin and with all the detailing the new logo only looks good when it's very BIG. But the new logo it's being shoehorned in everywhere and they're making it small, hence you miss all the detailing and worse, it looks oddly blurred.
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