This is a brilliant move by Marissa Mayer. She knows from experience that having the best of the best (not only in engineering- but also in design, marketing, etc.) is necessary for your success in tech. Large tech companies depend on their employee's pet ideas and projects, the fact that they might be well known in some niche for some open source project or blog, and so on. In a way, if you're a large company that needs to constantly be on top of the latest trends and technologies (because if you're not, the same thing happens to you as happened to Myspace), you're no different than YCombinator - except that instead of wanting your recruits to start their startup, you want them to run a project for you internally (all of the famous Google projects that originated from 20% projects could have easily been startups of their own).<p>Through these actions and posts, shes's showing how cool and fun Yahoo! is. Look, the CEO works on weekends with a small skunkworks team on designing logos, and nerds out on the subtle details like any cool designer would do.<p>This is all about making Yahoo! a desirable place to work at again. I'm receiving way more emails from Yahoo! recruiters these days than Google or Apple recruiters, and they all have a common tone: "check us out, we're fun!".<p>Similarly, all the small startup acquisitions have 2 goals: poach for talent, and get Techcrunch, HN, Engadget, etc. to talk about Yahoo. (the big acquisition we all talked about was about receiving a mature project internally as a way to make up for lost time)<p>Of course it's not just this that will bring Yahoo! to victory, but those little things show how much strategy there is in Mayer's execution.<p>EDIT: finally was in a situation where I could watch the video, and I only feel stronger about my point. Listen to the music (some dubstep/ibiza dance/feel good summer hit hybrid) - this is clearly destined to appeal to the 21 year old Stanford student looking for a new job, not the guy on HN who will criticize anything that makes it to the front page.
Several annoyances here:<p>1. Showing hand-drawn versions of your logo in what clearly is set in hardly-modified Optima (a typeface designed way back in the 1950s) makes me cringe. Why show fake process work?<p>2. No one is impressed when the manager does the job of their employees. For one, it implies that they don't trust their employees, and secondly, it makes the job of designers look like a fun hobby that anyone can get into. The result is exactly what happened here: an utterly boring logo redesign that looks just-polished-enough to make people think that Marissa Mayer is some kind of genius, yet simple enough to make people think that true designers bring no value to the table.<p>3. The whole 30 days of logos schtick was awful. Good artists know that the worst thing you can do for yourself is show <i>too much</i> of your own work. After a while, everything looks same-y and the weaknesses begin to become more apparent. The whole concept reeks of indecision and a pray-to-God moment that one of the logos would have such a huge outpouring of support that the Yahoo! team wouldn't have to make up their own minds on a vision.<p>4. The bevel isn't even customized. It's a preset Adobe effect. Pretending like the Y shape in the bevel was intentional is horseshit and obviously a desperate attempt to give some sort of conceptual significance to what is otherwise a completely forgettable design.
I've been trying to evaluate this logo under the assumption that the people who are working at Yahoo are smarter than me and have more information than me.<p>My personal reaction is that I hate the bevel. Hate. I was rooting for #10, which is a simplified and modernized version of their old logo.<p>But. I'm not a Yahoo user. Period.<p>The bevel immediately made me think of some brands you'd find on sale at Macy's, which mainstream America associates with quality, but which my artisanal-y brainwashed brain thinks of as mass produced junk.<p>Imagine for a second that Yahoo has research showing normal people reacting to this logo with words like luxury and high-class.<p>If that's the case, then Yahoo just pulled an epic branding end run. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are fighting to be the flattest, plainest, more boring brands. Then Yahoo stepped up and said, "Yo. Let's be fabulous together!"<p>In the old days, Yahoo's skunkworks Brickhouse division had posters in their break room titled "Know your competition" with pictures of Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. Trying to copy the other tech giants was (one of) Yahoo's problems because the Yahoo teams couldn't celebrate what they were actually doing well.<p>The contrarian in me salutes Yahoo for this crazy, out of left field, gaudy, off-trend logo. Genius.
I'd like to point out, for the record, that this "logo design team" consisted of:<p>- CEO<p>- SVP of "Brand Creative"<p>- VP, Creative Director<p>- Someone who doesn't seem to exist online, outside of articles about this new logo<p>- An intern<p>You'll notice a distinct lack of <i>professional designers</i> in that list. Apparently this 10 billion dollar brand wasn't important enough to put in the hands of, you know, experts. Instead, they spent a weekend (ONE WEEKEND) "geeking out" over it. Which is definitely the best way to design a global brand.<p>This is micromanagement at its very worst, and is an insult to the craft of design.
First impressions for me were "They've sterilised the logo!". Now it looks so corporate and planned...<p>... and I actually laughed when I read <i>"Our last move was to tilt the exclamation point by 9 degrees, just to add a bit of whimsy"</i>.
> We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.<p>This reminds me of the design team that tilted the Pepsi logo 10 degrees to show Pepsi was "leaning towards the future." [1]<p>Is there a rule that says you can't run a company if you see through these sort of lines as utterly laughable?<p>1. <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42740470/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesign-document-1-million-for-this/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42740470/pepsis-nonse...</a>
Well done - for a multi billion dollar company, spending a weekend on your logo is about the right ratio of time to value. Looks good enough to be acceptable, can be reused in all the sub projects. Done, now lets get on with real product improvements.<p>Move on folks, nothing exciting to see here
The main problem with this logo is that it sends conflicting messages. On one hand it wants to be funky (differently sized letters, tilted exclamation mark), but on the other it oozes conservative, with its square and straight typeface and lack of color. Overall, 'conservative' clearly beats out 'funky', with the few creative touches clobbered into submission. The larger Y and O, supposed to add dynamism and 'fun', are not different enough to pop and convey that idea. This is particularly jarring with the larger O next to the smaller one at the end - only different enough to confuse, not to send a message.<p>What's worse is the execution is poor and sloppy. It has no synergy. Notice the horizontal lines in the A and the H at strange 'close-but-not-equal' levels, neither tying into anything else in the logo. The flat foot of the larger Y sets one baseline, but the flat feet of the A and H define another, neither being referenced anywhere else in the logo.<p>Perhaps I just don't get it. Maybe the amateurism of it <i>is</i> the message, in which case it comes through loud and clear.
The CEO and an intern redesign a $25b company's logo during the weekend. That's news!<p>Minor nitpick: the logo is looking like a 1-bit alpha GIF on Chrome, due to the downsizing: <a href="http://cl.ly/image/183U1t0l1u3e" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/image/183U1t0l1u3e</a> (FF on the left)
I've designed a few logos in my time. All I see here is post-rationalisation, the last bastion of the cowboy designer trying to justify their costs.
Other than GuiA's (currently-on-top) comment, almost everything I've read here is disgustingly negative.<p>"She's a micromanager, she should be 'CEOing' instead of designing, she's a terrible designer, she should spend time with her kids (!!), she has hubris to say she can design something, it's all about her, she's destroying the craft of design, the wafts of Denning - Krugerism are pluming out."<p>I just... come on, people!
This seems to be really well intended, but this is the outcome when you put a data-geek into charge of design instead of a true artist.<p>If they had just launched a design contest on a freelancer, they would have had a multiple times better results. Why not try a golden-yellow "Y" on a blue background for instance. Think different, play with the colors.<p>Design has to come from the heart and really reflect the personality of the company and show the LOVE! This yahoo logo still looks very stoic and still like from the 90s, urgs.<p>Designing is simply not a data-driven approach, it is the complete opposite.
Design by consensus = bad, really bad. If the CEO wears the designer boot and conditions the final art I think it's one of the biggest mistakes they will do. Right now, that logo to me looks like more or less those logos you can find on logotypes websites for 30 dollars.<p>The logo on smaller sizes looks pretty crap. Just check it. The logo is only interesting on certain situations, that's why a good logo isn't just drop some non-straight lines in illustrator on a weekend.<p>Bezels? That's so 90's.
Watching this video:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agRxG-X_TEQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agRxG-X_TEQ</a><p>The pure typeface design is truely amazing and beautiful. The bevel and depth completely ruin the entire logo though. Yahoo should have gone with a flat design and a solid fill of their trademark purple color and called it quits.
Love the boldness. Going against flat is bold - and ugly.<p>It reminds me of a book I had in the 90s which showed 5-click Photoshop tricks, there was a golden bevel trick in there (and marble, and shadows, and stamping).
So, yeah, with all of this media around the new Yahoo I decided to attempt to re-embrace Flickr as a place to host photos. My old Yahoo email address account was long since gone, so I tried to sign up for a new account. On entering my Google Voice phone number (which I use as my official number everywhere, because it makes it way easier for me to switch carriers without worrying about number porting) as my mobile number their verification routine informed me it wasn't a valid mobile number... STRIKE 1.<p>So I get past that by entering my current actual cellphone number (which, again, I consider 'unofficial' since it may change 6 months or a year from now whereas my Google Voice number will not), which I had to go look up because I did not even know what it was... Annoying to have to do that, but not the end of the world.<p>I start uploading a set of 70 full sized photos to my first 'set' on Flickr over my not-so-fast DSL line. About an hour in to the upload, flickr informs me my login has timed out and the upload can't continue. Worse, not only did my overall upload not complete, but NONE of the photos in that upload show in my account despite the fact that the overall upload was about 50% done. STRIKE 2 through 71.<p>Yeah, nice-ish logo, even with the bevels, but until Yahoo fixes their shit, who cares? My impression of the company is actually much worse now than it was a couple hours ago when I was pretty much neutral on them. Needless to say my flickr experiment is over and I'm not likely to be signing up for any Yahoo services anytime soon.
It's obvious they missed the easiest way to simplify and modernize the logo... Drop the exclamation mark! Remember when Marissa had the TM removed? Nothing screams 90s more than an exclamation.<p>It takes courage to innovate. Ford, "They wanted a faster horse". Jobs, "They wanted a phone with a physical keyboard". Yahoo? The "new" logo doesn't signify that anything has changed.
Before reading this I felt the logo resembled the Google logo quite a bit in terms of the complexity of the font and the use of bevels, and felt like Marissa was involved and wanted to go for a familiar feel to that of Google. I feel its more likely after reading this considering who level in input.
Seriously, 31 comments about (a really mediocre if you ask me) LoGo? I'd only wanted to know how did it cost, out of curiosity... Because at eLance you can get a better one at 75USD without ruining a weekend (not joking).
Are they A/B testing the logo without the exclamation? About one out of 10 times I load yahoo.com the little animated ! never happens and the logo is left without the exclamation. Could just be bad code, though.
Until today, I believed Marrisa Mayer was all hype... she is a lady of attention to details - yahoo needs no other person her at this moment..<p>About the Logo, it seems so 90s.. normal people will be bored and you cannot explain the hyperbole's and the geometrical symmetry of the logo.. Yahoo needed a story that common man could understand - they have missed the train by designing a very technical logo.. I may be wrong, yahoo needs to attract technical people.. or I may be right with all the business happening at the consumer side.. they needed to balance - but they failed to do it..
Does anyone else here thinks the logo is much more feminine ?
It's more elegant, and the mix on bold and thin lines inside the letters reminds me a bit of fashion magazine logos ( think vogue).
Well, I like the bevel. It may not be flat but it does an excellent job in the context it's supposed to be used in - go check out yahoo.com.<p>That favicon could definitely be reworked though.
That Yahoo! brand, as represented by their logo must be quite an asset given how it is all over their CEO's blog as well as their corporate blog[1].<p>Ironically their corporate blog isn't loading at the moment because <a href="http://ajax.googleapis.com" rel="nofollow">http://ajax.googleapis.com</a> isn't responding. (Edit: - seems ok now)<p>[1] <a href="http://yahoo.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://yahoo.tumblr.com/</a>
It seems weird to me that they went through so much trouble focusing on tiny details and then making the logo on the homepage so small that you can barely see them. I'm pretty ignorant of design theory though - can anyone recommend any reading materials (general, logo specific or other) that would provide a good introduction?
Focusing on the logo is a detraction from the vast array of truly positive changes that have been implemented over the past 6 months -- by some very talented teams I might add.<p>No question the whole site is on the move. To where or what, I dunno. But my interest is piqued and the overall experience feels tighter. If that makes sense.
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/qv1WDrS.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/qv1WDrS.png</a><p>Anything will be better than this. My guess is that they're fully aware that the bevel makes a lot of people think of the 90's. To me, the message is "stability" and "experience".
I have a feeling that final results - people like the logo most similar to the old one - were anticipated at yahoo, and entire logo testing situation "fabricated" to state "you liked us all this time, and we're just reminding you of that".
Its not a logo I would have made, but its different and it doesn't look _bad_. I appreciate the explanation she gave about the different aesthetics that went into it and how they tried to give it some deeper meaning then just a font on a white background.
I hate the bevel but looking at it on the Yahoo website when the logo is crushed into the top right corner the bevel makes it pop out a little more and be more noticable when it is that small the bevel pretty much disappears.
Wow, the comments here about working on weekends are shocking. Rome wasn't built in a day and companies aren't built with 9-5 jobs.<p>This is sad and hypocrite. Every start up I know works hard, long and hacker news should know better
Logo is nice, it feels more modern. Chiseled bevel is a matter of opinion and would probably get removed on smaller scales (hopefully). I'd like to see them redesign their front page though. It's incoherent.
I'm not a designer and know nothing about logo design, so let me ask: Is there an objective way to evaluate a piece of design such as this new logo? Or does it just come down to personal like/dislike?
The current animated, 3d logo on the frontpage reminds me of BonziBuddy: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy</a>
Let's give some feedback about the logo here: <a href="http://usersnap.com/yahoologoreview" rel="nofollow">http://usersnap.com/yahoologoreview</a><p>I don't like it.
Nice. I like this one much better than the other 30 choices they presented to users.<p>*actually I didn't watch the video all the way to the end where it shows the bevel. Yuck. Why?