Yahoo’s new logo and the 30-day punchline

What happens when a CEO and an intern turn designers? About what you’d expect.

Aurich Lawson – Sep 5, 2013 10:50 am | 210

In better news, Yahoo's news of streaming the sixth season of Community didn't mention Chevy Chase's name even once.

There will be much hate on the Internet today for the new Yahoo logo. That’s what we do on the Internet: stomp on change until our feet are bloody, a satisfying group exercise. In this case, I’m not sure the hate is entirely warranted. It’s not a great logo, and it has flaws, but it’s mostly inoffensive and bland.

What I really see is missed chances. Yahoo had a great opportunity to advance the conversation about brand and design, but the company mostly seems intent on instead dumbing down the dialogue.

The 30 days of logos was really a good idea—at first. You announce change is coming in a way that prepares people for it while giving them a peek at the process. Anyone who has been involved in any way in a logo design knows that a lot is left on the cutting room floor, and there’s a long process before even the most obvious and simple executions are unveiled. Even the ideas that didn’t make the cut can be revealing.

Yahoo quickly punted the concept of logo design into the realm of the banal—“Oh look, another goofy word mark that looks like it was whipped up by an intern or someone who just learned Illustrator.” It turns out there was probably a reason for that. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer revealed this little gem:

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: 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.

Well look at that. The person who just learned Illustrator was also the person people were probably afraid to say “no” to, and hey, it turns out there was an intern working on it! It all starts to make sense. Want to add some chiseled bevels to your logo that will render as a strange doubled-up blurring at normal screen resolutions? Why not—the CEO thinks it’s great that it adds subliminal Ys to the letters! No, really, Marissa again:

For the texture, we came up with the nice idea of creating a chiseled triangular depth to the logo—this causes the letter Y to appear in the shading at the ends of each of the letters.

You know, because texture is the thing everyone is adding to logos. Also, animation is awesome, so let’s make the exclamation mark flop around like it’s having a seizure! High-five, intern! Go team Yahoo!

It’s a funny story—and easy to mock—but what I find offensive isn’t the final result. It’s not a great logo, but it was probably time for the brand to button up a little, hopping punctuation aside. And fine, lose the goofy letters for something a stone mason carved in marble. What gets me is the gleeful way Team CEO/Intern spent a weekend on this project and then called it done. The message my designer side cringes at is “anyone can do this, so why waste more than a weekend of fun on it?”

As long as you’re happy getting out what little you put into it…