After 30 days of showing runner-up that didn’t make the cut, yahoo unveils its new logo on Thursday. It looks cleaner and thinner and it is a new sans-serif typeface created by Yahoo. But much of the logo, including the exclamation point are the same.
The logo is still purple, it as a darker shade and features all the usual upper-case letters in the same order, then the signature exclamation point ends it.
CEO Marissa Mayer in a blog post on Tumblr, which Yahoo bought earlier this year, said that “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”.
“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,” Mayer added in her post, which goes into exhaustive detail about the thinking behind the logo
Mayer said, in a recent internal poll, 87% of yahoo employees wanted the logo changed.
“The logo is only part of a brand new branding and image campaign. It signals to consumers, investors and employees that change is coming,” said Columbia business school professor Bernd Schmitt.
Some internet critics are not impressed about the new logo, the new logo does not look different enough to raise eyebrow.
Also the reaction to the logo on Twitter has been less enthusiastic, Justin Williams said “The new Yahoo logo looks like it got run through Alien Skin Eye Candy on Photoshop 4.0”.
“A bad logo is all it took for Yahoo! to make everyone talk about it,” tweeted Preshit Deorukhkar, editor of design publication Beautiful Pixels.
“More often than not, when a company’s identity looks a little tired (or more likely when new leadership wants to put their own stamp on things), what’s already in place won’t need to be thrown out. It’ll just need to be freshened up,” said Airey.
Yahoo’s logo has not been changed since 2009, and it has been mostly the same logo since 1995. So the move to change it is now logical going by Mayer’s recent attempts to breathe new life into the brand.
