New logo: Yahoo!

A few hours ago, the Internet media company Yahoo! unveiled a new logo. And unlike other new logos unveiled by Yahoo over the past month, this one will be permanent. It was designed by an in-house team consisting of SVP brand creative Bob Stohrer, VP creative director Marc DeBartolomeis, Russ Khaydarov and intern Max Ma. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was reportedly also involved in the process.

Ahead of today's reveal Yahoo has posted a new logo every day for 30 days. Each logo was an alteration of the regular Yahoo logo with a different typeface, but keeping the different-sized letters and purple colour. It turns out the actual new logo wasn't that different. The new typeface is a more sober Optima-like semi-serif in a slightly darker shade of purple with a subtle bevel. In a Tumblr post CMO Kathy Savitt explains that they "wanted a logo that stayed true to our roots (whimsical, purple, with an exclamation point) yet embraced the evolution of our products". They also wanted to avoid straight lines and preserve valuable elements from the old wordmark. Employees were polled on the changes.

Previous logo.

A nice presentation video showing the craft behind the wordmark.



There's a detailed post about the new logo on Marissa Mayr Tumblr. Some of it is quoted below:

• 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.

Our last move was to tilt the exclamation point by 9 degrees, just to add a bit of whimsy.

[...]

Color and texture were pretty easy.  Our purple is Pantone Violet C - a pantone that needs no number and no introduction ;).  For the texture, we came up with the nice idea of creating a chiseled triangular depth to the logo - this causes the letter Y to appear in the shading at the ends of each of the letters.

The initial blueprint.