Yahoo Logo Redesign Unveiled

Written by Jill DiNicolantonio

 

About a month ago, Yahoo launched it's new logo project "30 Days of Change." The premise being it would unveil a new logo each day on it's homepage throughout the U.S. network. "It's our way of having some fun while honoring the legacy of our present logo," Yahoo said.



The project has now featured all 30 logos, the most recent being unveiled today and is the "official" new logo for the company. The official logo was not one of the previous 29 that was featured.  I am not sure I get the purpose of featuring 29 different logos before unveiling the official one - I mean everyone has an opinion and inevitably you are going to hear about why the one selected isn't as good as a previously featured one. I'm just not a fan of second guessing. I suppose it gets people talking about the brand - and after all isn't that the whole point?

In her recent blog post, CEO Marissa Mayer explains her thoughts on whole process.  Here's the Cliff's Notes version:

• "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."      
• "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."
• "Our last move was to tilt the exclamation point by 9 degrees, just to add a bit of whimsy."