New Yahoo Logo is more BOOHOO! than YAHOO!

September 5, 2013 at 8:49 pm / by

Have you been been wondering why the new Yahoo logo is banal, so “meh”, so underwhelming? I have found the answer on Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer’s Tumblr:

“On a personal level, I love brands, logos, color, design, and, most of all, Adobe Illustrator. I think it’s one of the most incredible software packages ever made. 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”

New YAHOO! logo as made in less than 15 minutes using Illustrator and Optima. Look familiar?
New YAHOO! logo as made in less than 15 minutes using Illustrator and Optima. Look familiar?

“I’m not a pro”!!! Truer words have never been said. Marissa, if you had hired a design firm and they came back with that, you would have fired them. I spent about 14 minutes with Illustrator, and ye-olde-corporate-favorite-font Optima, and pretty closely replicated the new Yahoo! logo. I know, it’s not exactly the same, but it’s not that different.

Marissa goes on and on about thicks and thins and scallops and serifs and that is all well and good, but the only IDEA or CONCEPT: “Our existing logo felt like the iconic Yahoo yodel. We wanted to preserve that..” is frankly not evident in the design. The yodel! I look at the new logo and I don’t hear it! Oh, this is a sad day. Another meddling suit trying to get all creative and then asserting their authority to rationalize their “design”.

Yahoo! design intern out does the boss.
Yahoo! design intern out does the boss.

Turns out Yahoo!’s design intern had a much more adventurous idea. He’s ditched the exclamation point for a “Y” that looks a bit like the two-finger victory “V”. It definitely looks for more native to the digital realm that is Yahoo! Does it border too much on comic-sans?

 
 

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