Describing Yahoo’s new logo as a disappointment is an understatement.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve visited the search engine’s homepage in the last 24 hours and failed to notice the transformation that has taken place in the left hand corner of the site.
After waiting 30 long days where the search engine showcased an array of great designs (which were obviously never going to make the cut) it opted for a design indistinguishable to its 18-year old counterpart.
Co-created by Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, the new design was unveiled on the company’s Tumblr page, accompanied by a blueprint of the design:
Mayer said in a blog post: ‘We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo – whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud.’
Well, the nod to Yahoo’s history is definitely clear.
Everyone from business leaders to tech experts and consumers have been left feeling disappointed. Although some admit Mayer is defiantly getting people talking about Yahoo – but it’s not necessarily for the right reasons.
This campaign has shown Yahoo is capable of creating all the right hype, but when it comes to the crunch, can’t deliver real results. Despite, Yahoo’s stock climbing nearly 80 per cent, most of this gain has been driven by the company’s 24 per cent stake in China’s Alibaba Holdings Group.
I’m now worried Yahoo is creating all this excitement for nothing – because really deep down I was rooting for the purple giant’s return to the spotlight.
This logo is not going to be a business saving idea, rather an attention grabbing headline (like all the others) that will soon be forgotten.
Encase you still don’t really understand what’s changed here’s Mayer’s bullet point break down:
- 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.
- We preferred letters that had thicker and thinner strokes – conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do.
- Serifs were a big part of our old logo. It felt wrong to give them up altogether so we went for a sans serif font with “scallops” on the ends of the letters.
- Our existing logo felt like the iconic Yahoo yodel. We wanted to preserve that and do something playful with the OO’s.
- We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark.
- We toyed with lowercase and sentence case letters. But, in the end, we felt the logo was most readable when it was all uppercase, especially on small screens.
