Design rule number one – never let your CEO anywhere near your new logo (Yahoo in this case)
Yahoo (we refuse to put exclamation marks into company names) has just got itself a new logo, courtesy it seems of CEO Marissa Mayer’s efforts over the weekend with Adobe Illustrator and a few design-minded minions.
Since she took over as boss of Yahoo 14 months ago Mayer has been spending money like water, most recently by buying photo-sharing site Tumblr for $1bn or so, without seeming to address the question: what’s Yahoo actually for?
Clearly it’s in a bad second place to Google in the search business and the rest of it is? Just quite a boring, vaguely news/celeb based website. All of which you can get somewhere else, rather more entertainingly.
But Marissa, who comes from Google, is, like lots of execs who come into creative businesses from money-making machines, determined to put her own creative stamp on the organisation. As if that’s why she was hired. And it’s not the problem, of course. The problem is that it doesn’t make enough money from the media business it has.
Producing a bloody awful new logo over the weekend is not the way forward (new one above, old one below).
I actually like Yahoo and I think Ms. Meyer is doing a decent job. The new logo is not my favorite, but I like the GIF idea.
As I say on “AdScam”… She wrote in a blog post… “I love brands, logos, color, design, and, most of all, Adobe Illustrator. I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous.” Oh yes in fucking deed. I can just see a member of her Logo Design Team saying… “Marissa, you’re full of shit,” before being escorted from the building.
Cheers/George “AdScam” Parker
Technique doesn’t triumph over beauty.