Yahoo unveils new logo

Oh my god yes. The sheer cost and hassle of replacing every single piece of collateral is just obscene. I’ve led several businesses through rebranding and inevitably, after doing an exhaustive inventory, I’ll get a call: “AAAH WE FORGOT THE MUGS!” or something. And there’s always a several-year period of awkwardness where the old logo’s still popping up here and there.

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In my limited experience, unless you’re a Very Famous Brand Agency, you can spin all of the BS you like about synergy and refreshing the brand for the future while keeping a toe in the past but the client will still say “that doesn’t look like you spent much time on it. Is $100 okay?”

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Have your new graphic design logo by all means, but spare us the pointless, pompous, hi-falutin’, pile of odious PR crap that is a Brand Identity Narrative, FFS.

It’s just an effing graphic.

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I rely on yahoo mail. What’s odd is they’ve been pushing this “Oath” terms of service thing for at least a year, which AFAICT is a “we reserve the right to hoover everything and sell it” sort of thing, but it has always given a “not now” option, so I’ve never agreed.

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Every day I aspire to be one one-hundredth the bullshit artist as the Pepsi Ratio crew at the Arnell Group.

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Kind of. This Yahoo (the one with the name) is just an investment firm basically. They were spun off because they just happened to invest in some minor startup from China called Alibaba and made billions upon billions off it. The Yahoo we think of from the 90’s was sold off to Verizon and is now called Oath.

ETA: oops, got my yahoo successors wrong. The investment company is “Altaba”. Yahoo is part of Oath.

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Control would have been better if it was set in the Yahoo headquarters.

I was involved on the internal marketing side of an organization that went through an expensive, externally-designed rebranding… I always wonder what the other, much better designs that got vetoed by some random member of upper management were, because in our case there were many.

The best part was when, very late in the process, someone highly-placed suddenly objected to the shape of a graphic element because of extremely vague potential negative associations—not going to reveal the actual element here, but it was on the order of “the diamond shape will make people think of baseball (even though we don’t do anything related to baseball) and the local team is terrible.” We sighed heavily and returned to the agency with that feedback. They responded by relabeling the diamond as a “kite,” without changing the shape at all. The objector was satisfied. It was possibly the single most genius act of marketing I’ve ever witnessed.

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And the countless hours of work it takes to shepherd this through the review and approval process, not to mention 7- and 8-figure salary executives wasting their time on said process. It boggles.

The only thing worse is when it’s done half-ass like this and has to be redone about the same time as the back-ordered golf umbrellas with the new logo arrive.

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Boing Boing still exists :thinking:

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Yep. I’ve been through more than one client rebrand and we have to reproof everything.

“Everything?”

“EVERYTHING!”

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The town where I went to high school (Toledo, Iowa) had a major controversy when a design firm made this sign for their water treatment facility. They said it was modern looking and stylish. Everyone in town just thought it was disrespectful to not capitalize the name. 604991_2

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I don’t know what those people take, but the Boing Boing Shop should try to sell it.

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I designed a tree frog silhouette as a conference logo. I had to change it to a chick because the owner was concerned it would have Pepe connotations.

I’ve been through two rebrandings with the same client company. They have a lot of locations, and I recently got a call from one of those locations asking why they can’t order the brochure with the logo version that was retired 10 full years ago.

“But, I liked that one…”

Yeah, sorry, dude.

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It could be worse.


(you can still see the Virgin America interior mood lighting)

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com-optimize

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Well, they paid one of the world’s top identity designers to have an underling type their name in Avant Garde.

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I think the name was typed in Calibri. Then they highlighted it and clicked on every font choice in Word until they found one they liked.

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The dot is probably because someone wanted the left edge of the dot to fit a line with the descending line, without checking if it actually did.