Yahoo’s New Logo
I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous :)
So, one weekend this summer, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into the trenches with our logo design team: Bob Stohrer, Marc DeBartolomeis, Russ Khaydarov, and our intern Max Ma. We spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday designing the logo from start to finish, and we had a ton of fun weighing every minute detail.
So, the stunt was mostly just a stunt but it worked in creating expectation and giving Yahoo some momentum into launching its logo. The problem is: the result did not deliver. Showing mildly venturesome graphic approaches throughout the 29 days gave me hope that there would be something radically cool at the end of the process. There wasn’t.
This is not how any company, big or small, cherished or unknown should design a company identity. The more I read about Yahoo!’s process for this redesign, the less respect and confidence I have in them. […] It’s that point of gullible disbelief where one starts to look around for hidden cameras. Are we being punked?
The new logo isn’t awful, but it isn’t great, either. The video does show a grid with lots of circles.
Update (2013-09-06): Oliver Reichenstein:
This post is not about the technical quality of the logo. I am not writing about brand design, but about brand management. This is about a simple rule: Brand design follows brand management, not the other way around.
Yes, we could have done a lot of different things besides throwing 29 disparate high school lettering projects on the internets for a month to see if anyone cared. But that would have required adult supervision for design and, honestly, we don’t care that much.
Designing for mathematical consistency ignores three related factors: that identical widths and shapes appear differently to the eye in different combinations within a letter or glyph; that identical shapes blend together and are harder to differentiate across words and lines; that letters in a typeface are placed alongside each other, and one must adjust to deal with common juxtapositions.
Update (2013-09-20): Marissa Mayer defends the new logo (via Brand New).
