Wow, that was a great read. So many great collisions of emotions and ideas.<p>After reading it I understood that the author was deeply offended by the characterization that the Yahoo! logo could be redesigned in a weekend. I get that, they work at a high end logo design studio, it's like telling a Ferrari mechanic you spent the weekend with some tools from Pep boys and tuned your Ferrari to give it an additional 15% BHP. The dissonance of knowing, as a professional in the space, what it takes to re-design a logo, and Marissa's characterization of the same, really irked this guy. That left me wondering how much of that irritation was professional pride.<p>The meta point the author is trying to make, which is that brand and logo are intertwined but the dependency relationship is backwards in Marissa's post, reminded me of the clothes argument. That is the argument about the phrase "The clothes make the man."<p>The two sides of that argument are that your a better person if you dress well, and if you dress well you are a better person. Which follows which? Can that even be resolved? I had this discussion with my teenage daughter when she wanted to dress like a pop star, who dressed like a slut. We had the whole talk about how clothes are a sort of 'marketing' for the person you are, and people will set their interactions with you to how you dress first, and the way they know you second. So if their first setting is 'slut' then you may get so pissed off at them that they never get to see the real you, and a friendship opportunity is missed.<p>So our author has extrapolated that it is how you are as a company, that emerges in your logo, not your logo defines how you are as a company. And I tend to agree with that, but I also know that companies evolve based on how they see themselves. So the argument that Marissa is trying to create a <i>perception</i> which then manifests as reality is certainly plausible. I know when Yahoo! called me a while back (in the Carol Bartz days) and said they were looking for engineering leadership for the Web's #1 media company I thought "Hmm, this is a company that is not in touch with what they are." but it was what they were trying to be.<p>So my summary of the article is that the author's pride was wounded by Marissa making it sound like Logo design was trivial, and attacked both her understanding of logos and the whole branding process in response. Along the way he gave us a couple of interesting things to think about.