After 18 Years, Yahoo! Sports a New Logo, and It Sucks

Any company which has a table of organisation should ought to let it work to its full advantage. In the case of Yahoo! which has recently launched a new logo, CEO Marissa Mayer should better have left any aesthetic dealings to her team. Her job after all deals much more than tinkering with the design of a new logo.

On Thursday, after a month of tinkering, rehashing and much visual imagination, Yahoo! unveiled its new logo design much to the chagrin of the global WWW community.

"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." Ms Mayer said in her personal Tumbler account.

Ms Mayer went on writing and explaining the decision behind the new logo visuals in her Tumbler:

• 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.

However, the reactions of netizens worldwide seemed to run to the contrary of what Ms Mayer wanted to achieve for Yahoo's new logo design.

My initial reaction on the new Yahoo logo video (http://t.co/W9mpeUyIu9): pic.twitter.com/2JZINY4NwG

— Clément Faydi (@cfaydi) September 5, 2013

the yahoo logo is clearly the result of a collaboration between the CEO & an intern. the only way to make it that bad http://t.co/QhFaZp3oSo

— Ann Boobus (@a_girl_irl) September 5, 2013

The most remarkable thing about Yahoo!'s new logo is how utterly unremarkable it is. http://t.co/hQB5pWU91v

— Jared M. Spool (@jmspool) September 5, 2013

This 'blueprint' of the Yahoo logo is the most contrived load of junk I've ever seen. Way to post rationalise Optima. http://t.co/5p6VNNEKqG

— Dave Foster (@fostertype) September 5, 2013

Connie Birdsall, creative director of brand strategy firm Lippincott, summarised in a nutshell the general observations towards the new logo design.

"Do I think it's the most interesting design of the century?" Ms Birdsall asked. "No, but it's definitely a more grown-up Yahoo."

"I think that day after day, we saw purple logos with not a lot of design happening, and we thought that maybe, on day 30, there would be this big 'Whoa! Super-change!'" Ms Birdsall was quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle. "But I think that the new logo was more about building the idea of change in to the psyche of people who use the site."

She also said the change in just its logo design is highly unlikely to harm the company.