How Yahoo Picked a New Look
For An 18-Year-Old Brand
Tim Peterson
Portal’s Design
Team Created
New Typeface for
Company’s Mark
Yahoo has refreshed its 18-year-old logo to match the nearly
two-decade-old portal’s ongoing makeover under CEO
Marissa Mayer.
Capping a thirty-day campaign leading up to the official
unveiling, Yahoo pinned the first major redesign of its logo
since 1995 to the site’s homepage early Thursday morning.
But here’s the punchline: the new logo was not among the 30
teased over the past month.
Created exclusively by Yahoo’s in-house brand design group
and product designers, the new logo retains much of its
predecessor’s qualities -- the purple, the exclamation point,
the varying letter sizes meant to represent a yodel’s sound
waves -- but simultaneously modernizes it and applies a
classical aesthetic.
“This represents a significant evolution of the logo,” said Yahoo
CMO Kathy Savitt, who joined the company in September of
last year. She outlined how characteristics inherited from the
old logo have been tweaked. The purple is “far richer, deeper.”
The exclamation point has taken on a slender, rounder shape
and will animate for three seconds (“half a yodel,” per Ms.
Savitt) after someone initially navigates to a Yahoo site.
Yahoo SVP-brand creative Bob Stohrer said the design team’s
aim was to create a logo that was “sophisticated with a wink.”
Those animations are not dissimilar from the Google Doodles
of Ms. Mayer’s former employer, but not static. “It might be
an exclamation riding on a Segway, or riding on a pogo stick
or swinging on a Tarzan vine. It’s a hat tip to the traditional
whimsy our users have loved and will continue to love,” Ms.
Savitt said.
But the starkest departure from Yahoo’s old logo is the font.
That should surprise no one who paid any attention to the ones
Yahoo teased each day for the last thirty days. Those new logos
were criticized for being little more than font changes and less
impressive than the Doodles Google semi-regularly rolls out.