New Yahoo! logo
Out of context: Reply #124
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- BaskerviIle0
"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. "
A logo design team??
I've worked in corporate branding for 10 years, I've rebranded some very large international companies. None have ever done it in-house, and the CEO has always been made to understand that rebranding is a signal of strategic or structural change to a business. It is never simply redecoration.As anyone with even limited experience knows, a brand/branding works through behaviour, tone of voice, product, environments, interactions, so many things that are not visual design. The visual identity of a company is one of the least important parts of a rebrand, the logo itself is pretty much the least important part of the visual identity (and I admit this as a designer).
In one move Marris Mayer has shifted all media focus to the very least important part of her brand. Her 'getting her hands dirty' helping design has amplified this focus. She should be using this opportunity to lay out a roadmap for how she will reshape Yahoo and bring together all its services into one cohesive ideal. But no, she tried to make it look like she designed Optima.
I can't think of a worse way of approaching a rebrand.
The 30 days of change thing could have been useful, explaining over the course of a month how the new brand will work, what they will stand for and how it will help users. Instead they just rolled our crappy logo after crappy logo, finally ending up with this Optima thing.It's not even a case of whether you like the logo or think it's well designed. It's that the logo is irrelevant if the brand continues to flounder around buying up other companies and not standing for very much at all!