Yahoo Unveils a New Logo Design!
This week Yahoo revealed its new logo, the first redesign of the logo in 18 years. Yesterday Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer blogged about the design process and rationale behind the new logo. Mayer said:
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.
Yahoo's 'making of' video that explains the process behind the logo does a great job to promote design thinking. If anyone doubted the intellectual rigour behind design, they'd surely change their mind after they see the volume of intellectual, emotional and creative energy that powered the new design from Mayer and her team.
In August Yahoo announced they were getting a new logo. Yahoo, under Marissa Mayer's leadership, took the unusual and creative step of showcasing a daily logo over 30 days in the lead up to the ultimate reveal on September 5th.
The new Yahoo logo
Data-driven Design Testing
Cudos to Yahoo for executing a brilliant marketing campaign. The campaign has generated tonnes of online buzz and drew attention to the importance of company logo design, as well as high engagement from Yahoo users, and the (inevitable) Tumblr parodies like the Big Dogs the project.
Our CEO / founder Alec Lynch thought this idea was pretty cool and wrote an article about Yahoo's 'data-driven' design testing approach in Fast Company last week, reminding us that Mayer was the brains behind Google testing 41 shades of blue to see which resulted in the highest click-through-rate. How rad and geeky is that?!
Yahoo might've ended up with Day 10's logo if consumer researcher Survata's Yahoo logo poll of 12,000 respondents had influenced the decision. This design is more derivative of Yahoo's old serif font.
12,000 people prefered this logo from Day 10
DesignCrowd's (unofficial)Yahoo Logo Design Contest
Here at DesignCrowd we thought it would be fun to invite our designer community to submit designs in parallel to the Yahoo campaign. We crowdsourced over 200 Yahoo logo design ideas for $200.
You can check out the full list of logo submissions here: https://www.designcrowd.com/yahoo-logo-design-contest
Whether you love or hate the new Yahoo logo, here is a short list of the top alternative Yahoo logo designs submitted to our contest.
Winner
 |
anghelaht (Romania)
"Minimal approach. Logo depicting a
happy face using some of the word
mark's elements! Yahooooo! :)" |
 |
Best of the Rest!
 |
nandesign (Indonesia)
I chose a font that connects to represent
people around the world can connected
each to each other. |
 |
 |
patramet (Thailand)
"Iconic exclamation point. I designed it to
speak "Yahoo!" |
 |
 |
BigBlueCurrant (UK)
"Tongue-in-cheek design parodying the
'golden ratio' principles." |
 |
 |
 |
umakantth
"Using the exclamatory mark in a negative
space of the letter H." |
 |
Which was your favorite design from our round up? Do you love or hate the new official Yahoo logo? Let us know in the comments!
Are you a designer? Here are 7 strategies for winning more logo competitions.
Written by Jo Sabin on Friday, September 6, 2013
Jo Sabin is Head of Designer Community at DesignCrowd. She's led the company's public relations and social media programs since 2012. With more than ten years' experience working with Australian and international tech startups in the creative industries, Jo has been instrumental in meeting DesignCrowd's objectives in Australia and abroad. Get in touch via Twitter.
