OMG - I’ve lived that cartoon strip many times.
I work in engineering; I have worked for two companies with iconic logos: BellSouth and Motorola.
When I started working through my ideas in writing, I flashed back to my days at BellSouth, where I was forced to take a course on proper use of our logos. See, BellSouth was smarting pretty bad right then - they’d just lost the copyright on one of the most recognized logos in the world, the Yellow Pages logo. I had to take the course in order to understand how to keep BellSouth from losing an even more recognized logo - the Bell symbol - one of the most valuable logo properties ever, the second most known logo in the world (after Coca Cola). In the course we were told that the Bell logo was worth untold millions, nay, billions to the company and its value was so vast that it would be impossible to ever recapture should it be lost.
Not only is Yahoo’s design poor, but it is sad that Melissa Mayer does not recognize how valuable a truly iconic logo could be to her company. I imagine what an amazing logo could have done for Yahoo as it reboots itself, and I feel that I am witnessing the exact moment that their reboot failed.
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Funny you should mention that. I only heard about the new logo because my wife was ranting about how hopelessly badly Yahoo has botched their new YahooGroups “neo” interface. “30 days of change” is an appropriate title here - stuff has been changing every day, ranging from
- “changing all the URLs” to
- “changing the landing page for the group to start at Messages and moving the old landing page into ‘About’” to
-“Not changing the help screens, so they still point to the old URLs, not the new ones, and since nobody knows to look at the ‘About’ page, they won’t see your explanation” to - “Some updates and queries that worked yesterday don’t work today and vice versa” to
- “Protecting you from Little Bobby Tables attacks by messing with quote marks and &s on input, which is a lot of fun if your group meets at a restaurant with an apostrophe in the name” to
- “Not telling you that the reason your update is failing is because they didn’t like the quotes and &s.”
It’s a hopeless mess, with engineers making widgets that break and designers “helping” that by making it hard to find the broken widgets. It feels like the “agile software development” version of all the things that go wrong when you do “Just In Time” inventory management badly.
Who! The! Hell! Still! Uses! Yahoo! Anyway?!
And isn’t that the message the new logo is inadvertently sending. Even the CEO thinks its not worth a proper effort.
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Yahoo does a whole LOT of things. They might not do them all (some might argue any of them) well, but they do a lot. Yahoo Mail, Flickr and Tumblr, in particular, are 3 of the higher profile items in their portfolio. And despite letting Flickr languish for years, they’ve done some interesting things with it recently (which people apparently absolutely love, or absolutely hate).
As for the new logo? I’m not a graphic designer, I’m not a font geek, and I don’t see what the big deal is. The logo seems fine to me. And I think the vast majority of the non-graphic-designer, non-font-snob public would probably feel mostly the same way that I do about it, inasmuch as we put any thought into new logos for companies at all. But, reading some of the graphic designer commentaries on it (and especially reading about the process behind creating it), I can see how graphic designers would be up in arms about it. It’s just not something that I understand, really, at all. I really, really wish I had more graphic design skills (it would make my job as a developer so much easier), but I just don’t seem to have the eye for it.
Oh, man, I want that yes or no crayon job. The people that weild the crayon get paid rather obscene mountains of money for their kindegarden level of involvement, eh?
I remember NBC paid a ton of money for a new logo several years ago, a big “N.” When they started using it it turned out to be exactly like a previously registered mark used by a bank in Nebraska, (or something.) They Nebraska folks said they had designed it in a weekend (or something.) NBC went back to the bird, realizing they could not pay to get as effective a logo as what they already had.
It isn’t well understood, but they do have a huge unconscious effect on how you perceive a company. Success is not ever guaranteed, but some people, a few, have very good records of producing lasting and dignified logotypes and branding for big corporations. That would suggest that there is something to it. Sometimes people are lucky, or have a knack and hit a home run with an amateur product, but using a tested professional is a surer path.
Interesting. Background:
The new logo with abstract capital “N” letter appeared in 1976.
The cost of the new NBC logo was estimated to be between $750,000 and $1 million.
“N” logo bumper from 1977:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG3HhgBTxv8
NBC was sued by Nebraska Educational Television (ETV) over the stylized “N” logo since they had used identical logo for 2 years.
NBC settled out of court with ETV by giving them roughly $500,000 worth of used television equipment and $55,000 in cash. In exchange, NBC got the rights to the “N” logo.
A few years ago I worked on an NBC show, and every week I had occasion to deliver things to the KNBC building in Burbank (yep, home of The Tonight Show). In one of the hallways between the lobby and the cages where setpieces for Days of Our Lives were kept, there were several framed examples of the evolution of the NBC logo, beginning with a couple dating from the radio era (not that all that many people saw those particular logos during their radio programs, ha ha).
Anyway, the weirdest one I saw was a cartoon peacock drawn and signed by (of all people) John Kricfalusi, of Ren & Stimpy fame. I don’t think I ever saw that particular logo used on-air, and I don’t know the circumstances under which it was commissioned, but I sorely wish they’d adopted it permanently.
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Apparently it was a promotional thing - they commissioned 7 different artists to do their own version of the peacock: http://articles.latimes.com/1993-08-27/entertainment/ca-28334_1_cable-network
Edit: and here’s the 2 John K animated spots
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