Feature
Yahoo continue its image makeover today, this time with the unveiling of a new logo that comes with a dancing exclamation mark. The new design, which went live this morning, has been met by some very large yawns by an industry that probably thinks Yahoo has more things to worry about than its logo.
Marketing Yahoo's Logo
The marketing campaign for the new logo took 30 days and was entitled "30 Days of Change." This consisted of presenting one of 29 candidate logos on the Yahoo website homepage every day during the campaign until the 30th and final one was unveiled as the winner at midnight on September 5th.
In a post on Tumblr at the start of the campaign, Kathy Savitt, Chief Marketing Officer at Yahoo explained that the change to the logo would reflect the changes that are happening all across the company.
Over the past year, there’s been a renewed sense of purpose and progress at Yahoo!, and we want everything we do to reflect this spirit of innovation. While the company is rapidly evolving, our logo -- the essence of our brand -- should too,” she said.
She added that the color purple, Yahoo’s iconic exclamation point and “the famous yodel” would all be retained as “…some things just never go out of style…”
Where the old logo has block-type fonts, the new one is slimmed-down, shiny and more horizontally aligned -- and a little bit more serious than the old one.
In fact, if you look at it -- and this is only a personal opinion -- it looks remarkably like the old logo and begs the question why? (If you want to read how Marissa Mayer and the design team came up with the final logo, you can check out her Tumblr post here).
Yahoo's new logo blueprint by Marissa Mayer
Talking About Yahoo
However, if the new logo did little to help Yahoo’s share price (in fact it fell by 0.04%), it did, in a sense, achieve what the original idea was in the first place: to get people talking about Yahoo, or at least the Yahoo logo.
While many commentators have merely reported on the announcement, others have found it hard to hold back. Cited on Forbes business website, venture capitalist Mike Arrington had this to say:
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I’m pretty sure that even 10 years from now I’ll still look at Yahoo’s new logo think “That’s one godawful fugly logo right there.” It’s a serious case of “A camel is a horse designed by committee.”
Forbes also cites entrepreneur Derek Powazek, who pointed out that “…no logo ever solved a business problem, but especially not this one...”
Yahoo Moving Forward
And this really is the issue. Turning Yahoo into the web heavyweight it once was. Since she took over last year, Mayer has embarked on a spending spree that has seen it gobble up a whole pile of smaller companies possessing technologies that she wants to turn around Yahoo.
A large part of its website has been redesigned and she has also hired a whole bunch of new recruits, including researchers, to make the product better and develop new products.
As yet, however, nothing has really changed at the company and the last set of figures, while not exactly terrible were far from promising, especially given the 24+ acquisitions Yahoo has made.
While the Yahoo logo redesign may well be just be “fun”, it has had the effect of getting people talking about Yahoo even if it didn't produce the uproar Mayer may have hoped for.
