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Yahoo! unveils new logo, turns everyone into a design critic

Jacky Yap
yahoo new logo

Shortly after we reported Yahoo!’s mobile redesign across its various products, the global internet giant has today unvealed its new logo. Here’s how it looks like:

Glenn Tokunaga, Art Director and Senior Brand Specialist at Yahoo, explains more:

For Yahoo! employees, this isn’t new. We’ve been bleeding purple since 1996 when we anointed it as our corporate color. Why purple? Lore has it that our notoriously frugal co-founder, David Filo, got a great deal on lavender paint for our decrepit offices. But ultimately, purple evokes everything that makes working here so unique. Now we want to share that energy with you.

Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer has wrote on her Tumblr, sharing the story of the new logo:

We hadn’t updated our logo in 18 years.  Our brand, as represented by the logo, has been valued at as much as ~$10 billion dollars.  So, while it was time for a change, it’s not something we could do lightly.

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.

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.

Other elements fell quickly into place:

  • 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.

And, we were off.  Here is the blueprint of what we did, calling out some of what was cool/mathematical:

How did the web reaction to the new logo? Let’s take a look:

 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

Well you know what they say, haters gonna hate, and suddenly everyone is a design critic now.

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Read also: Yahoo and Twitter rolls out new look, reinforces importance of design

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