Yahoo unveiled its brand new logo last night as promised, 30 days after it announced it was going to. Here’s what it looks like:
A month ago, Yahoo CMO Kathy Savitt had revealed the company’s intentions to change its trademark logo and an accompanying promotional campaign that unveiled a new logo design every day for 30 days. People were asked to vote on which logo they liked best. A fun activity, but ultimately it had no bearing on the final design, which ended up looking pretty similar to the design they rolled out on day one.
The new logo, while still retaining Yahoo’s trademark purple, isn’t as playful as the old one. Gone are the misaligned letters and the angular spacing. Instead, we have a more grown-up, mature look, with the letters perfectly straight and upright, without serifs. Has Marissa Mayer rebuilt the logo in her image?
Well she certainly had a lot of input in its creation, as she describes on her Tumblr.
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.
Mayer even put up a blueprint of the design, along with everyone’s comments:
Her blog post then proceeds (rather endearingly) to geek out over the technical details of the logo design, from serifs, to Pantone shades.
– 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.
What do you think about the new logo? Love it or hate it? Or do you just not care, which could also be bad for Yahoo, showing that it just doesn’t have passionate followers anymore.
Say what you will about Marissa Mayer, she’s a great communicator as a CEO and she’s managed to keep the whole affair lighthearted and relatable. People can read a lot into a logo change, but Mayer has chosen to not give too many lofty “start of a new era” type statements and instead just put things simply by saying the logo had been the same for 18 years, it was time for a change. And given the different directions Yahoo is going in, it would be hard to disagree.
Here’s a video made by a Yahoo intern that explains the creative process:
