Through these actions and posts, shes's showing how cool and fun Yahoo! is. Look, the CEO works on weekends with a small skunkworks team on designing logos, and nerds out on the subtle details like any cool designer would do.
This is all about making Yahoo! a desirable place to work at again. I'm receiving way more emails from Yahoo! recruiters these days than Google or Apple recruiters, and they all have a common tone: "check us out, we're fun!".
Similarly, all the small startup acquisitions have 2 goals: poach for talent, and get Techcrunch, HN, Engadget, etc. to talk about Yahoo. (the big acquisition we all talked about was about receiving a mature project internally as a way to make up for lost time)
Of course it's not just this that will bring Yahoo! to victory, but those little things show how much strategy there is in Mayer's execution.
EDIT: finally was in a situation where I could watch the video, and I only feel stronger about my point. Listen to the music (some dubstep/ibiza dance/feel good summer hit hybrid) - this is clearly destined to appeal to the 21 year old Stanford student looking for a new job, not the guy on HN who will criticize anything that makes it to the front page.
So, so much for making users think the company has moved beyond its stagnant products. Which in a lot of ways it has, look at the Yahoo weather app for Android, the design is modern and integrates one of Yahoo's rather under leveraged properties: flickr. That was nice design.
As to signals to the best of the best, this blog post confirms both that she will micro manager you and do design by committee simultaneously (a dubious distinction I don't think even Steve Balmer could achieve). And that's the signal if they like the logo.
Someone said that Steve Jobs wasn't a micromanager, only a great manager obsessed with details. I guess he should have stayed in his kitchen making sandwiches for his four kids.
For what it's worth Straw-man Steven Jobs --- the mascot of Apple and God design --- is said to have obsessed over details when telling people their designs were shit and needed to be redone. As far as I am aware, the Steve Jobs of legend didn't actually sit down and do design work himself.
Micro management is a style and I agree one weekend work session isn't enough to say she is a micro manager, but her blog post is certainly enough to say she micro managed the logo design and people will extrapolate (especially since she was criticism for micro-managment while at Google). Unless of course the story that the logo was designed primarily over a weekend isn't true and/or she wasn't as involved as she said she was. I don't think those are likely or better alternatives.
Micromanagement is a bad management style to apply with creative teams. It breaks the creative flow, clouds judgement of quality and adds external pressure to a process that depends on consistent internal drive. You can micromanage accountants, SAP programmers and clerks, but if people like those in design teams or R&D are focused on quality, micromanaging them quickly begins to resemble herding cats.
> Someone said that Steve Jobs wasn't a micromanager, only a great manager obsessed with details.
Someone said that about Steve Jobs, and his work was of a very different nature. Articulating the concept of personal computing into a product is very much unlike the process of designing the logo, even if they are superficially similar.
I can just about hear his voice: "This is shit!"
A logo should look great on a massive banner as well as my tiny retina screen. Right now, when it's smaller, the bevels and shadows/jaggedness of the logo are very off putting, not something I'm pleased to look at.
It should be noted that it was under this individual's reign at Google that the notorious 41 tints of blue occurred[1], which was clearly an indicator of abject ineptitude regarding art and design.
The comment about Illustrator was cringe worthy. The idea that someone is so filled with hubris regarding a field well outside their domain has the wafts of Denning - Krugerism pluming out.
[1] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
The effort of moving the conversation further with this marketing is impressive.. How many more "30 days" type of marketing initiatives will this create?
Me, I think that a logo is just a logo, and that a logo (and even a logo design process) is almost completely orthogonal to a company's ability to recruit and retain talent.
> 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.
The Yahoo! logotype was important enough to involve the CEO of a $25B company, and frivolous enough to knock out in a weekend.
I think that combination is probably accurate, but I don't think that is a bad thing. Mayer knows that something like this isn't really in the job description of a CEO. They don't pay her the big bucks to play around in Illustrator and it isn't a efficient use of her work day. But this is something she is interested in and something she thinks is important to the new image of Yahoo. So she dedicates a weekend (as off the clock as a Fortune 500 CEO can be?) to meet with the design team and get the work done. The move actually sounds pretty calculated and smart to me. It shows that she both knows her roll in the company but will still pay attention to the details.
In a design world that seems to be shifting to high-resolution, flat design, this seems like an odd step backward.
> Through these actions and posts, shes's showing how cool and fun Yahoo! is. Look, the CEO works on weekends with a small skunkworks team on designing logos, and nerds out on the subtle details like any cool designer would do.
Through these actions and posts, she looks like someone I wouldn't want to work with, or for.
I avoid people who claim "I am not X, but I know enough to be dangerous" like the plague they are. I've had my share of "I am not an engineer, but I know enough to be dangerous"; they're the people who think you used two decoupling caps in parallel because you couldn't find one with the right value, or who are always there to help you with an obvious and useless tip when you're debugging a program -- and then you spend five minutes explaining them why they're not even close to the problem (partly because they used some words that mean something different than what they thought they mean). And take another fifteen to gather back your focus, as a bonus.
Second, if I had some work to do, the last thing I'd want is the CEO in my room. Yahoo looks like a big company, don't they have some CEO-ing to do? When you decide you want to make a career out of pushing papers and borderline lying to investors, stick to it.
Third, having the CEO bug you and working weekends is a really low, indecent form of manipulation. Someone who's designs stuff for Yahoo is probably experienced enough to have gone past the "I have to work weekends to impress my boss and jumpstart my career" phase. The dudes probably had families to spend time with (or bars to hit and get drunk over the grudge of their loneliness, whatever). Let them go home, you can brag to the press about what a workaholic culture your company has without actually keeping your employees at work over the weekend.
Sure, if the atmosphere is fun enough, it may seem like you're having fun and playing, but this doesn't avoid the burnout, it just makes its settling less painful.
> finally was in a situation where I could watch the video, and I only feel stronger about my point. Listen to the music (some dubstep/ibiza dance/feel good summer hit hybrid) - this is clearly destined to appeal to the 21 year old Stanford student looking for a new job, not the guy on HN who will criticize anything that makes it to the front page.
This is clearly destined to appeal to the ambitious, 21-year hipster who wants to be a corporate drone but with style, you know, like he's not a corporate drone. Job-desperate, loan-starved young graduates who want to subscribe to the 70 hours a week -- but oh so fun -- culture.
I don't think they are to be condemned (we were all pretty stupid when we were 21), but someone who perpetuates this culture isn't to be admired and certainly not made an example of, not among tech professionals anyway. Among Wall Street investors? Sure, who the hell wouldn't admire someone who can make people work over weekends and proud of it.
Also -- at the risk of doing a sexist no-no -- I can't help but wonder how someone like, say, Steve Ballmer, which I guess no one around here wants to do, would have been treated if he were the one treating his employees like this -- micromanaging exactly the people you shouldn't micromanage (i.e. the creative team), over a weekend, then bragging about how hip it is.
Breathing life into a company is a difficult task, and Marissa Mayer seems to be trying to do exactly that. Initial success is obviously to be applauded, but don't be overly enthusiastic. The smith's fire will eat through the coals and make the iron unworkable if you overwork the bellows.
> Yahoo looks like a big company, don't they have some CEO-ing to do? When you decide you want to make a career out of pushing papers and borderline lying to investors, stick to it.
Do you purposely have you head in the sand or haven't you heard of all the policy changes and various acquisitions?
Besides, branding is "CEO" type work.
> Initial success is obviously to be applauded, but don't be overly enthusiastic.
Hmm, let's see. In the past year, Yahoo!'s stock price is up 91.6%. That's pretty good "initial success".
Remember what happened before that? From 2007 onwards, Yahoo went through 5 CEO's.
Branding is CEO type work. Logo design isn't. Encouraging people to put all their resources into their work is awesome. "Jumping into the trenches" (oh, over the weekend!) isn't what the CEO of a multi-billion company does, it's what an arrogant, career-oriented boss who can't delegate does to compensate for his apparent lack of sufficient involvement.
Leading an agenda of technological innovation is also "CEO" type work, but would you like to do pair programming with the CEO (who hasn't worked on anything longer than a thousand lines in half a decade) on a Sunday evening?
> Hmm, let's see. In the past year, Yahoo!'s stock price is up 91.6%. That's pretty good "initial success".
That's one year. It's something well worth the "initial" mention. That's less than a fifth of the time Carly Fiorina spent at HP, and she also did a lot of important strategic moves.
This reminds me of when I asked on HN what would be good professional management that is as general purpose as the old MBAs.
* "I work on weekends." (With a hint of "Just saying...").
* Designed in only two days.
* This was personal. Talking about her love for design and "most of all" Illustrator (!?) says "It's at least partly about me."
* Mixed messages. "We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo." -- yet the logo ended up with a ton of essentially straight lines.
And worst of all, the new logo seems to throw out too much of the old brand, misunderstand modern design trends and logo portability (logos with depth still need to be interesting when flat), and try too hard to have weight and impact without really achieving it. For example, the saturation of the purple has been pumped up till it almost hurts your eyes. Like TV sets at Best Buy, it's attention grabbing, but it's not desirable in the long term.
Though, it may stand out amongst all the flat logo designs, I wonder if it will stand out looking old, or just be more noticeable.
In some ways, but I think Yahoo! has essentially proven their brand is so weak that it can be represented by a new poorly thought out design every day and, well, no-one cares.
If Apple, McDonald's or Coca Cola did something similar, they'd be committing brand suicide and attracting a lot of flak, but with Yahoo it's just "Oh well, another new Yahoo logo, who cares?"
I remember Apple's iOS 7 Video, where some guy was geeking out about the grid they've designed and are using for everything, from icons to UI layout.
> but with Yahoo it's just "Oh well, another new Yahoo logo, who cares?"
To be fair, Yahoo didn't change logo for 18 years, according to the OP. It's pretty big news.
This is simply not true. There is a metric ton of examples of "success in tech" WITHOUT "having the best of the best". Microsoft would be the prime example. Twitter - another.
Microsoft the hot late 80s/90s company was where the best of the best went. Why do you think Spolsky started his career there right out of college?
That's now. Look back to their FailWhale period. They certainly didn't have "best of the best", yet they did succeed. Though I guess you can count Arrington's constant cheer-leading as the best of marketing... but it'd still be a stretch.
> Why do you think Spolsky started his career there right out of college?
Because of their stock option program, why else. But that's irrelevant.
Microsoft did not succeed because they had "best of the best", but because of their underhanded sales and customer entrapment tactics.
Point being the company don't need "best of the best" to succeed. It's often sufficient, but it's certainly not necessary.
You are looking at those companies after they won, but when they started and with no proven credentials against them I doubt you would have the same view about them then.
Its the other thousands on the periphery that are approaching mediocrity. Although still quite profitable.
If MS was a Java fun house like Yahoo, they would have tanked long ago.
My personal reaction is that I hate the bevel. Hate. I was rooting for #10, which is a simplified and modernized version of their old logo.
But. I'm not a Yahoo user. Period.
The bevel immediately made me think of some brands you'd find on sale at Macy's, which mainstream America associates with quality, but which my artisanal-y brainwashed brain thinks of as mass produced junk.
Imagine for a second that Yahoo has research showing normal people reacting to this logo with words like luxury and high-class.
If that's the case, then Yahoo just pulled an epic branding end run. Google, Apple, and Microsoft are fighting to be the flattest, plainest, more boring brands. Then Yahoo stepped up and said, "Yo. Let's be fabulous together!"
In the old days, Yahoo's skunkworks Brickhouse division had posters in their break room titled "Know your competition" with pictures of Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. Trying to copy the other tech giants was (one of) Yahoo's problems because the Yahoo teams couldn't celebrate what they were actually doing well.
The contrarian in me salutes Yahoo for this crazy, out of left field, gaudy, off-trend logo. Genius.
I'm astounded they didn't hire an agency for this. Updating the logo for a major brand is incredibly specialized work and not something for which in-house talent is typically suited. They're too close to the brand to be objective and with an agency the power dynamic is better - they can fire the client if they're being dumb. I'm a fan of Marissa, but she should leave font and logo design to the pros.
I can find lots of designers claiming they're out of fashion, but I can't find anyone with a history of the bevel...
Can someone call Roman Mars?
Sounds like Yahoo's market positioning to me.
The only thing I can come up with is that someone, probably Mayer, thinks it's a hipster cool throwback to the late '90s when everyone was using Photoshop's default bevel and emboss filters like there was no tomorrow.
This reminds me of the design team that tilted the Pepsi logo 10 degrees to show Pepsi was "leaning towards the future." [1]
Is there a rule that says you can't run a company if you see through these sort of lines as utterly laughable?
1. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-42740470/pepsis-nonse...
"To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal - and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17stephenson.html?...
If you are a geek or nerd, you just are. You don't have to convince other people of it.
While I'm sure I'll get used to the new design, it leaves me emotionally empty. I very much preferred the old one.
This might be contrary to what a lot of people here are saying -- I'm not sure adding a professional designer to the group would have made a difference.
You need to add the right designer. Not all designers are equipped to work in those situations, i.e., one who can deal with the huge personalities and egos of those on the redesign committee. And the worst egos in the room aren't always the CEO, they can often be the creative director types.
I'm pretty sure no such process exists today though, which (at least to me) makes various statements that sound as if they were part of such an objective evaluation sound so hilarious.
Note: I have nothing but respect for the skills of good graphic designers, but it's just very strange to hear some of the justications made. My favorite regarding this logo was from the second bullet:
We preferred letters that had thicker and thinner strokes - conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do.
What does that mean? Am I supposed to look at the logo, and somehow conclude "ah, it uses both thin and thick strokes, naturally that is because Yahoo are sometimes subjective, sometimes they're editorial". Is "editorial" even the opposite of "subjective"?!
Hilarious.
Of course, these people may be biased, but at least they have more experience in evaluating logos than others. So in general, if many of them like it there's a good chance it's actually good.
The other thing you can do is to look back. In 10, 20 years, it might be more obvious whether a logo was successful or not. But again, that may be influenced by the success of the company.
I think saying that it all comes down to personal taste is bit misleading, because that personal taste is generally shared by a large part of the population.
"Of course, these people may be biased, but at least they have more experience in evaluating logos than others"
This just raises the question of how these experts evaluate a logo.
I understand that academic art criticism [1] has developed frameworks for evaluating works of art - genre, cultural impact, relationship to preceding works, etc. But a logo isn't art - it is almost entirely functional and used for (mundane?) concerns like brand identity. I can appreciate that some logs have existed for long enough that they have a historical context (e.g. Coca-Cola) but I don't see how this helps evaluate its primary purpose.
Any graphic designers want to comment?
- CEO
- SVP of "Brand Creative"
- VP, Creative Director
- Someone who doesn't seem to exist online, outside of articles about this new logo
- An intern
You'll notice a distinct lack of professional designers in that list. Apparently this 10 billion dollar brand wasn't important enough to put in the hands of, you know, experts. Instead, they spent a weekend (ONE WEEKEND) "geeking out" over it. Which is definitely the best way to design a global brand.
This is micromanagement at its very worst, and is an insult to the craft of design.
Simply picking the right designer is something that requires an inordinate amount of taste to start with. People with no taste or feel for design stand a strong chance of picking a poor designer (or agency).
I'll cite Wolf Olins here as my example. Not only is it clear that no one in Wolf Olins seems to have taste or a feel for design, their clients don't seem to have it either. So there's a feedback loop of affirmation as people with no taste reward other people with no taste, which in turns makes other people with no taste think those other people with no taste have taste because all the people they know that they think have taste think those other people have taste.
Meanwhile, the actual people with taste are watching from the sidelines, because they've marginalised themselves by being honest about what is good design and what is bad design, but with a passion that comes across as pedantry and rudeness. So they watch in despair as the whole debacle unfolds in front of them, growing ever more frustrated which serves only to marginalise them even more.
While I'm here... I think almost everything Wolf Olins churns out is sub-stadard slop barely worthy of a fist year national diploma students portfolio. Their work has neither grace, finesse, or charm. It's all cack-handed indulgent arse-gravy of the highest order dipped in a seemingly bottomless ocean of post-rationalisation and I can not believe that people keep lapping it up. It's rank amateur. Their work stinks like shit and I hate them for it.
And there I go, proving my point about why no-one listens to designers.
... and I actually laughed when I read "Our last move was to tilt the exclamation point by 9 degrees, just to add a bit of whimsy".
Perhaps the ratios of the bevels and font size contain some hilarious, hidden inside joke for mathematicians which I do not understand.
Which is good branding, considering how one of Yahoo's strongest points is that they go after female market segments that geek-driven companies often fail to capture. They're chasing women. Not just women, but decidedly non-geeky women.
Remember that Yahoo's logo was originally red, not purple.
The Clinique branch has similar "scallops" and no straight edges... http://bit.ly/161aoLo
1. Showing hand-drawn versions of your logo in what clearly is set in hardly-modified Optima (a typeface designed way back in the 1950s) makes me cringe. Why show fake process work?
2. No one is impressed when the manager does the job of their employees. For one, it implies that they don't trust their employees, and secondly, it makes the job of designers look like a fun hobby that anyone can get into. The result is exactly what happened here: an utterly boring logo redesign that looks just-polished-enough to make people think that Marissa Mayer is some kind of genius, yet simple enough to make people think that true designers bring no value to the table.
3. The whole 30 days of logos schtick was awful. Good artists know that the worst thing you can do for yourself is show too much of your own work. After a while, everything looks same-y and the weaknesses begin to become more apparent. The whole concept reeks of indecision and a pray-to-God moment that one of the logos would have such a huge outpouring of support that the Yahoo! team wouldn't have to make up their own minds on a vision.
4. The bevel isn't even customized. It's a preset Adobe effect. Pretending like the Y shape in the bevel was intentional is horseshit and obviously a desperate attempt to give some sort of conceptual significance to what is otherwise a completely forgettable design.
From this I remember various things you may remember too:
1. The Google favicon. They did thousands and the one they choosed was crappiest one. They had to change it later. 2. The Google favicon with blue. Also, they did silly tests. Now that thing is gone.
I think this post resumes it well http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
About the Logo, it seems so 90s.. normal people will be bored and you cannot explain the hyperbole's and the geometrical symmetry of the logo.. Yahoo needed a story that common man could understand - they have missed the train by designing a very technical logo.. I may be wrong, yahoo needs to attract technical people.. or I may be right with all the business happening at the consumer side.. they needed to balance - but they failed to do it..
You may be correct though. What does the LOGO has to do with what Yahoo! will achieve is beyond me.
I like logo stories: Makes you think that if Nike didn't had the Just do it logo, it would have failed (and some kids in Eastern Asia wouldn't have to work their ass out for my Nikes).
That favicon could definitely be reworked though.
*actually I didn't watch the video all the way to the end where it shows the bevel. Yuck. Why?
There were no 30 choices. This was always the final logo. The 30 prior "logos" were a "whimsical" way of getting users used to the idea of change. None of those 30 logos were done seriously...
Move on folks, nothing exciting to see here
What's worse is the execution is poor and sloppy. It has no synergy. Notice the horizontal lines in the A and the H at strange 'close-but-not-equal' levels, neither tying into anything else in the logo. The flat foot of the larger Y sets one baseline, but the flat feet of the A and H define another, neither being referenced anywhere else in the logo.
Perhaps I just don't get it. Maybe the amateurism of it is the message, in which case it comes through loud and clear.
Minor nitpick: the logo is looking like a 1-bit alpha GIF on Chrome, due to the downsizing: http://cl.ly/image/183U1t0l1u3e (FF on the left)
"She's a micromanager, she should be 'CEOing' instead of designing, she's a terrible designer, she should spend time with her kids (!!), she has hubris to say she can design something, it's all about her, she's destroying the craft of design, the wafts of Denning - Krugerism are pluming out."
I just... come on, people!
If they had just launched a design contest on a freelancer, they would have had a multiple times better results. Why not try a golden-yellow "Y" on a blue background for instance. Think different, play with the colors.
Design has to come from the heart and really reflect the personality of the company and show the LOVE! This yahoo logo still looks very stoic and still like from the 90s, urgs.
Designing is simply not a data-driven approach, it is the complete opposite.
The logo on smaller sizes looks pretty crap. Just check it. The logo is only interesting on certain situations, that's why a good logo isn't just drop some non-straight lines in illustrator on a weekend.
Bezels? That's so 90's.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agRxG-X_TEQ
The pure typeface design is truely amazing and beautiful. The bevel and depth completely ruin the entire logo though. Yahoo should have gone with a flat design and a solid fill of their trademark purple color and called it quits.
May I present the new Steve Jobs, everyone.
It reminds me of a book I had in the 90s which showed 5-click Photoshop tricks, there was a golden bevel trick in there (and marble, and shadows, and stamping).
So I get past that by entering my current actual cellphone number (which, again, I consider 'unofficial' since it may change 6 months or a year from now whereas my Google Voice number will not), which I had to go look up because I did not even know what it was... Annoying to have to do that, but not the end of the world.
I start uploading a set of 70 full sized photos to my first 'set' on Flickr over my not-so-fast DSL line. About an hour in to the upload, flickr informs me my login has timed out and the upload can't continue. Worse, not only did my overall upload not complete, but NONE of the photos in that upload show in my account despite the fact that the overall upload was about 50% done. STRIKE 2 through 71.
Yeah, nice-ish logo, even with the bevels, but until Yahoo fixes their shit, who cares? My impression of the company is actually much worse now than it was a couple hours ago when I was pretty much neutral on them. Needless to say my flickr experiment is over and I'm not likely to be signing up for any Yahoo services anytime soon.
It takes courage to innovate. Ford, "They wanted a faster horse". Jobs, "They wanted a phone with a physical keyboard". Yahoo? The "new" logo doesn't signify that anything has changed.
Ironically their corporate blog isn't loading at the moment because http://ajax.googleapis.com isn't responding. (Edit: - seems ok now)
No question the whole site is on the move. To where or what, I dunno. But my interest is piqued and the overall experience feels tighter. If that makes sense.
Anything will be better than this. My guess is that they're fully aware that the bevel makes a lot of people think of the 90's. To me, the message is "stability" and "experience".
This is sad and hypocrite. Every start up I know works hard, long and hacker news should know better
I don't like it.
Am I just following the braying "flat is the new shiny-lickable" herd here?
