Marissa Mayer Put in a Weekend's Worth of Work Designing New Yahoo Logo

As Ad Age (and everyone else under the sun) has reported, Yahoo has a brand-new logo, part of the 18-year-old portal's way of acknowledging the changes at the company under CEO Marissa Mayer. What reports didn't say is that Ms. Mayer herself had a big role in the redesign, as she explained today in a post on her Tumbr. "On a personal level, I love brands, logos, color, design, and, most of all, Adobe Illustrator. I think it's one of the most incredible software packages ever made. I'm not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous :) So, one weekend this summer, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into the trenches with our logo design team" Apparently not one to watch from the sidelines, Ms. Mayer wrote that she and her team designed the logo from start to finish over the majority of a Saturday and a Sunday. The marque is the first redesign of the brand's logo since 1995, and according to Yahoo CMO Kathy Savitt, represents a "significant evolution of the logo." It's still purple, with the letters of different sizes representing a yodel's soundwaves, and retains its trademark exclamation point -- but the color is a richer one, and the exclamation has gotten a more modern shape. Ms. Mayer wrote that some of the design elements that she thought most important were that the logo shouldn't have any straight lines, because "straight lines don't exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature." Some of the elements from the old logo, like the yodel and the serifs, were also preserved, she wrote. Some of the early reactions to the new logo have ranged from the unabashedly critical (venture capitalist Mike Arrington called it "fugly") to those who saw the silver lining in the whole process, such as Preshit Deorukhkar, the editor in chief of design mag Beautiful Pixels. A bad logo is all it took for Yahoo! to make everyone talk about it.

Marissa Mayer Put in a Weekend's Worth of Work Designing New Yahoo Logo

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