Ah, design… Always an interesting conversation. The same goes with engineering.
How many of you (us) have already cursed the engineers who designed the packaging supposed to open easily, but do nothing of the sort?
The Yahoo logo looks awkward, but hey, at least it’s not as bad as the new trend of websites where images open in a pop-up window where the cross on top right is actually a zoom, and the “close” button is at the bottom.
That is bad design, unless, I suppose, you are a designer so used to Apple products that you forget that many people actually use Windows, where a cross on the top right has a particular purpose. Would it have been too difficult to make the zoom cross shaped like a + sign, to start with?
I’ll go back to planting “Get off my lawn” signs now. In Comic Sans.
I love graphic design. I think the new Yahoo logo is uninspired. But, at the same time here are the logos from some of the top fashion brands
http://lepor-lepos.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/luxury_logos.jpg
In other words, just a plain name as a logo has plenty of precedent. If Yahoo becomes the shit people will be fine with the logo.
i obviously don’t visit Yahoo often. what changed?
Eh, that isn’t really true. By all accounts Google has one of the dumbest logos and company names in existence I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that both the logo and the company name came from a drunk engineer. It really doesn’t matter. Google the company into a word in the freaking dictionary by, unknow, having a product that people wanted, stupid name and logo be damned.
Don’t get me wrong, if a CEO tries to walk into a logo design meeting, someone should tackle her to the ground, drag her out, and duct tape her until her madness passes and she realizes that she has as much business designing logos as the president of GM has installing my breaks. CEOs get the big YES or NO crayon to sooth their ego, not an actual say. You have a multi-million dollar company, you shouldn’t be designing a bad (or to my layman eyes, dully neutral) logo. A good logo doesn’t hurt, but if Yahoo implodes, it will because they don’t do anything that anyone wants to pay them for.
WTF does Yahoo do besides offering up a really shitty start page?
So what information do they need to convey beyond “you’re currently at Yahoo?” And how does their logo fail to convey that information?
I’m sure you do take it a lot more seriously than I do but that doesn’t imply that it should be taken that seriously,
Depends on the trade. In my line of work engineers ‘do’, designers ‘think’.
Design is, by its definition, the process of solving problems.
Is it taking things too seriously to expect a solution to be well thought out?
[edit: I think this ended up as a reply to the wrong comment]
Design is marketing? I could write an essay on the rediculousness of that statement alone.
However I don’t believe that the average joe should care about design. They shouldn’t need to. If you’re paying attention to somethings design then it has been designed badly. Design is a process, not an end result.
In my line of work if something isn’t designed well then it will lose the company LOTS of money. Performance metrics are no harder to pinpoint for design than they are for engineering.
If a widget breaks, it’s the engineers fault. If nobody can find the widget (or struggle to interact with it) then it’s the designers fault. Both are business critical issues.
The differences are that Jobs had a decent inherent design sense (especially for hardware), and that he was more of a guide or curator.
There seems to be a couple common misconceptions cropping up in this thread id like to bring to light.
Design isn’t aesthetics. Design is the process by which you reach the aesthetics (among other things). Oftentimes design can be confused with art, which it ain’t.
Good design is design that meets a brief and achieves its goals. If you don’t like how it looks it’s not neccessarilly badly designed.
Just wanted to clear that up.
(By the way, great write up @GlennF ! )
Not enough
This is an article labeled ‘opinion’ from a designer reflecting on a design. Since you don’t care about design much, I’m not sure why you’re wagging your finger at people who happen to be interested.
It’s not like a bunch of designers derailed a conversation about world hunger here.
It’s strange how fervently you are arguing to not talk about something.
Like this?
Precisely!
I know when I see a beveled sign in all upper case in real life (typically on a bank), I think to myself, that sign is whimsical, yet sophisticated, modern and fresh.
Seriously. The awful kerning. The ancient bevel. The fact that they hammered it out in a weekend and then did a design review by polling the entire company. It sounds like a amateurish way to redesign the logo for a $10 billion company.
Huh? For many of those brands the text only version is not the only logo.
To me the logo is pretty boring, but it’s Yahoo so what do you expect? What is more damning to me is what she’s saying about the design process.
It reads like an undergrad’s first project proposal.
*Full disclosure: I’m a developer with an art degree. It can happen.
I think people believe this because when things actually are well designed it feels seamless and natural. If you don’t actually spend time thinking about how that must have been achieved it probably seems like it just happened that way.
And sure, accidents some times produce great results. Not typically though.
Some one brought up Google, and sure Google started out with everything seemingly done wrong. However, since that time they’ve clearly invested in turning that wrongness itself into branding. That’s actually exactly the kind of design we’re not seeing here from Yahoo.
