Not to discount the technical analysis, but it still begs the question of whether any of those points matter for non-designers, or for the business. Just because they didn't go through an agency doesn't mean the logo won't be successful and the attention won't help the business.
I hate to bring up Google, but they've done pretty well despite having a history of logos no self-respecting agency would ever produce.
Yeah, I feel for those agencies, and at times like this I'm glad to be a software developer. A whippersnapper may say he can do my job over a weekend, but delivering it is another thing entirely.
I don't think we have to bring up Google. In fact, we don't even have to go beyond Yahoo. For all the talk on design and building a strong visual identity, Yahoo in its glory days was visually atrocious. And it didn't mater a lick.
I do not agree. The reason logos usually are expensive and take months: Because what else? If I have a multi-million Dollar marketing budget, sure the logo will take a good chunk of that, not only, say one permille (still enough to pay 5 designers for a week). If I want to change the perception of my company, I will not rush.
Does this mean the logo will perform better than one a design student made over the weekend? No.
Do many months of work prevent a failure? No.
In the end, Yahoo wants profit through revenue through site usage through loyal users. Does letter spacing have an influence on this? I doubt it.
Seems like anti-intellectualism. Just because you can't recognize an outstanding logo doesn't mean there is no such thing - it is an art form and a science, which is the reason there are superstars in the field who command hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees. (Whether or not a logo has a real impact on business performance is another discussion.)
Science you say? Yahoo changed it's logo daily last month. Let's have a look at how the search queries went down with every bad logo proposal (some really looked horrible).
I'd be interested in some blind study: Give some top notch designers a logo of a real, say, investment bank, from a foreign country, and an alternative proposal from a design student, and let them explain which is the real one and why. Has anyone ever seen such a study?
I agree with this assessment - apparently taking this task so lightly (especially given the poor outcome) is a baffling and shocking misstep, so bad that I have to think hard about if there is some hidden angle I'm not seeing, some genius act of extremely subtle performance marketing. It would seem extreme to judge a CEO by something relatively trivial and unimportant such as this, but honestly the way this project was handled makes me very bearish on Yahoo under Mayer.
>> And what is more efficient than working directly with the CEO on the brand identity? A dream setup. Also, it’s cheap. A weekend for a logo, instead of paying a branding agency millions and waiting months for something that can be done in a couple of days? That’s smart business!
>> Is it?
Yes. People will bitch about your logo whether you paid $100mn for it or hacked it over the weekend. Logos, like names, don't actually matter much. It is the change that is important, not the design.
How I perceived this article: I'm a thoughtful designer and pissed off that an "amateur" CEO is dipping her toes in my sandbox. Also, if I can bill a client for months of logo design and they see a Fortune 500 CEO doing it themselves they may question if I'm worth it.
(I know nothing about the author, so this is just my perception.)
Yes, there's some validity to calling out the bullshit in Mayer's fluffy post. But equally mixed in are just as many nonsense bits...
I didn't, and frankly, it seems like such a little change, I doubt many even noticed.
Changing your logo to change your brand identity is the business equivalent of buying new running shoes to start shaping up. It doesn't quite work, does it?
So I'm glad they didn't spend thousands and ten thousands of dollars on a new logo, because if the logo change is just ego stroking for the CEO, there isn't much use of spending months and awe-inspiring sums on it (like that matters).
I totally disagree. And yes, it is just a logo. Google logo is still looking like it was made by a 10 years old. Sounds like the author is trying to justify his daily rate. Come on. And when big companies pay millions for a logo, it's not just for the logo itself, it's for all the identity of the company. Yahoo! changed its logo but the majority of the people won't even notice.
It seems odd that the writer first bashes MM for just getting in a room with some designers over a weekend, criticizing the concept of doing something so important in such a slapdash fashion, and then bashes her for polling the company about what they'd like to see in the logo, because it's "Design by polling". But - doesn't that show they did a lot of work upfront, that it wasn't just a slapdash effort?
The whole article reads like a bitter rant from the company that didn't get hired to do the work, instead of a thoughtful discussion of the logo itself (I'm not saying that iA was in the running to do the work, just that the tone is oddly hostile).
The whole thing feels like a marketing play, to be honest. An attempt to gain some attention by riding the media wave about the new Yahoo logo.
There's nothing wrong with that, per se. Plenty of agencies, SaaS companies, and service providers do it. Hell, plenty of agencies get hired to do it on behalf of their clients.
What rankles here is the tone. As you say, it reads "bitter." The author's confrontational style does him no favors. It piques our interest in his agenda (whatever it may be), rather than in his content.
There's a difference between opinionated and rude. I don't think rude in a company blog makes the organization look good. I'd be less likely to hire them because it seems they can't provide constructive criticism without being jerks.
Whenever I hear someone say "not being professional", I replace "being professional" with "conforming to my overly narrow world view." While professionalism is an important concept, it has never been the case that I have seen it referenced properly. Instead, it's usually just some SJ who can't sleep at night unless everyone fits into a little box.
I've been around adverting for a long time. I've been in agencies, I've freelanced, I've been the client. I've worked with individuals that charge $70/hr and teams that charge $20,000 per day.
The author is completely right on one point: "...the saying in design: 'if it looks right, it is right.'”
Here's the dirty secret: All logos are designed in a momentary collision of experience and accident. All logos are, in a sense, designed in a weekend. That doesn't mean it isn't done thoughtfully. But that huge research spend? It sometimes guides the design a little, but it's mostly there to reverse-justify the final result (and of course expense) with the client.
He's also asking us to assume the only thought Yahoo ever put into their logo and apparently, their brand, was that one 36-hour period. And the implication of course is that a large spend with an agency would result in a design that's both more calculated and less contrived.
Yeah, given how easy it is for folks to learn the tools of their profession, graphic designers have an interest in aggrandizing their roles.
The Nike logo was designed for $35 by a graphic design student rather than an experienced firm. Phil Knight said he didn't "love" it, but it would work.
You're missing the point. The point is the logo really doesn't mean squat. In the long run in it's the products and/or the advertisement with the logo tacked on.
It doesn't help the author's case that he castigates Yahoo for creating the logo in an "unprofessional" short period of time, but then also sneers at them for their month long process of unveiling it and for polling their employees on their views about values to reflect in future Yahoo logos.
You can't win, except perhaps by a marketing agency run by a guy who can see "purpose" in the ugliness of the very expensive London Olympics logo but not in the cheap publicity of Yahoo's "30 days of change"...
If Yahoo! really wanted to signal their change towards modernity and freshness, they were already sitting on their perfect logo: http://i.imgur.com/VpAwbwS.png
Says the guy with a 'strategic design' firm... Bullshit player lobbing bullshit claims at bullshit.
Maybe he's A/B-ing some secondary bullshit article to see what can get better rank on HN. What's the best link bait for placating boredom and wasting attention on derivative industries suckling at the teat.
I suppose Elon Musk has spent every single past weekend starting a space program, and Marissa Mayer has no potential to ever achieve anything lofty enough to appease you ever in the entire future.
That's a space program without actual space travel so far. And that's an electric car company that has a very limited amount of presence all of which is in USA (power stations etc.). The guy is talented but let's cut the hype a bit.
On the one hand, the author is absolutely right that a good professional designer can bring things to the process that enthusiastic amateurs cannot. A really good logo doesn't just look cool, it communicates something about the nature and spirit of the company visually. It lays down a marker: "this is who we are." A designer who knows the grammar of visual communication will have a better chance of delivering that than will someone who doesn't.
On the other hand, the author sadly doesn't do a great job of arguing the above point. Rather than, say, taking some great logos and pulling them apart for us to show how they do what they do, we just hear a lot of complaints about how the way Yahoo did theirs was "unprofessional." It makes it sound like the main complaint is that Yahoo had the gall to cut designers out of the process rather than that they chose a path that was more likely to result in a crappy logo, which strikes me as a more powerful (and accurate) complaint.
In other words, outside the community of professional designers, nobody cares if Marissa Mayer hurt some designers' feelings. What they care about is how Marissa Mayer is stewarding the Yahoo brand. If you want to convince them that your way is right and her way is wrong, don't show them how her way threatens your business; show them how her way threatens her business.
I disagree, he actually makes it clear on multiple occasions throughout the piece that his critique is not about the end product of the logo and what could or could not have happened in the hands of a real designer.
His critique is about her unserious approach to the process, an approach that she then justified in a cloud of post-process rationalization. His critique is saying that if this is the way she treats the logo redesign (even celebrates the casualness of the approach) then is she actually a competent steward for the Yahoo brand.
I think it's a question worth asking and find that many of the comments here seem very focused on the debate about the merits of the logo design, rather than the question of brand management which both the piece, and thankfully your comment, at least attempt to address.
And part of why I ended up skimming the piece is that I'm not convinced original post can be interpreted to that degree.
Remember, this is (putatively) a direct communication from the CEO of a large multi-billion dollar company. If it sounds breezy and informal, it is because she wanted it to sound breezy and informal. Whether or not the actual process described is breezy and informal is hard to ascertain under the fact that she wanted it to sound that way. Every sentence may be literally true, but who knows what was omitted to fit the breezy-and-informal template.
I think an awful lot of people are over-interpreting a chunk of text that probably doesn't contain anywhere near as much information as it appears to. CEOs at this scale are masters of using lots of words and appearing to say things while in fact saying either nothing at all, or saying something that bears very little resemblance to the surface.
> And part of why I ended up skimming the piece is that I'm not convinced original post can be interpreted to that degree.
Not to interject -- well, ok, to interject -- but isn't this completely backwards? Shouldn't you skim articles you mostly agree with, but read more intensely those you disagree with? You get less out of the former and probably know what they'll say, regardless.
I had the same response. It's not about agreeing or not -- there's no point to reading an opinion piece that covers my opinion plus my rationale -- rather, it's about assessing the quality of the arguments as you go.
I started reading, was put off by the snark and sarcasm (snark is occasionally entertaining; this wasn't), then I got to where the author was baffled that Meyer described Yahoo's identity in positive terms. Really?
I skimmed a bit after that then wrote it off as a waste of time.
"His critique is about her unserious approach to the process..."
What's so laughable and made me skim the article is that all of his arguments are based on tidbits of social media that described the process. It shouldn't be a newsflash that those tidbits are part of the marketing campaign themselves. I don't see how someone in the business could be taking them at face value.
I suspect that Yahoo did have a whole design and marketing process (and a large budget) around the logo redesign, and this turned the redesign into a carefully scripted story in and of itself. The stories of a CEO working over the weekend were parts of that script, probably true at the core, but embellished and certainly not revealing the whole picture.
Essentially, I found this designer's rant to be rather feeble.
And incidentally, I like the new Yahoo logo, I also pay for Yahoo premium mail (only because Yahoo is not Google, oh wait, that's Bing), but I certainly don't lionize the company.
The author makes a much better point, underlining that it is not about the technical quality of the visual brand
> "This post is not about the technical quality of the logo. I am not writing about brand design, but about brand management. This is about a simple rule: Brand design follows brand management, not the other way around."
He clearly states that and how this kind of approach hurts the business. Yahoo's problem was not the logo, but who and what Yahoo is. The logo can help clearing that up if it is an integral part of the brand identity which goes back to the brand ambition, not to Mayer's personal preferences about colors and shapes.
>> In other words, outside the community of professional designers, nobody cares if Marissa Mayer hurt some designers' feelings.
You're absolutely right.
In my opinion, the whole point of the logo redesign had little to do with the logo and much more to do with a PR move. The logo refresh was an announcement to the world that Yahoo is no longer the pre-Mayer Yahoo.
The logo might have been a casualty of this PR stunt (I personally hate the new logo), but really, a bad logo doesn't stop people from using a product.
What the writer fails to notice is that the reason there is a lack of technicalities surrounding the logo is that it's clearly an emotional decision, not a logical one.
Yahoo!'s challenge isn't their logo. Yahoo!'s challenge is ensuring their brand becomes associated with whatever they do best.
When I think of Google I think of search, ads, and Android, and GMail. When I think of Microsoft I think of Windows, Office and XBOX. When I think of Apple I think of the iPhone, and the iPad. When I think of Facebook I think of photos and privacy (lack thereof).
When I think of Yahoo there's no defining correlation to anything. I realize many people frequent their services - but personally Yahoo! doesn't stand out as "best" for anything, and I don't even know what direction they intend to pursue to change that perception.
No, it’s not getting attention. It’s gaining trust. Ironically, for that you need a reflective, clear, and consistent brand identity. A different logo powered by bullshit doesn’t convey identity and trustworthiness. It conveys desperation.
While the overall sentiment of the article is sound, I slightly disagree with this. First, this whole story of "creating the logo in a weekend" with an "intern who did some motion graphics to convey it's uniformity" is pure and simple, a publicity stunt, and a good one at that.[1] Personally I don't think there is an intern named Max who did that (most likely an agency), but this subtly conveys the perception of something that Yahoo is missing - innovation by small teams. The reality is that Yahoo does have a brand problem (just as MS does in the consumer-mobile space), so they have two tactics they need to implement in order to properly manage the brand:
1. Change the perception of the brand (changing the logo to match the new found brand perception is a good way to do that)
2. Create buzz around the fact that the perception has now changed.
Marissa's plan for the logo did just that. I think it's a good strategy and something Stringer Bell would have been taught in his business class.[2]
THAT is a very interesting thought and addresses the article on its own terms. I was getting a bit weary of the designer-ego bashing. The idea that the story they are trying to tell is one of rapid innovation in small teams is a really excellent observation, and if that is what she is truly trying to accomplish it's very interesting.
That said, where does the 30 days of logos fit in? Just as a ramp to draw additional attention to the CEO blog post?
I think the 30 days of logos is an ongoing engagement that achieves two things:
1) Provides an on-going set of buzz. You'll have heaps of people criticizing a lot of the logos. The PR value is absolutely massive for a 30 day event.
2) Reinforces the perception that Yahoo is open, creative and is "listening to it's users".
I was getting a bit weary of the designer-ego bashing
I don't think the designer-ego bashing was unwarranted, since I agree with the author on that premise. What the author failed to recognize is why this PR move was written this way.
Wow, kudos to this perspective. I could have seen these design blogs rattling out a list of reasons why Yahoo's logo process isn't "The Right Way" -- namely because it reduces the process of designing a logo(and depending on who you ask, the entire brand) into a weekend with a small, internal team and the CEO. This kind of practice in a 10 billion dollar company is poisonous for professionals who chalk up big money on brand identity consulting and development. Imagine if Yahoo rewrote a major application in a weekend with a small team and the CEO; engineers would scramble to debunk that it could be accomplished, and work hard at discrediting the results of the Yahoo team who did it.
I think your perspective is probably the real take away from Marissa's blog post. Looking like small agile teams together in the trenches with big decision makers is the way bold ideas come out of Yahoo makes them sound leaps and bounds ahead so many other web giants. Thanks for your take, it was inspiring.
It sounds like to me that Max is a very gifted young Chinese designer living, studying and working in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if someone turned that into a massive PR story in itself. Max represents everything us "non-corporates" beleive - that meritocracy should ultimately win.
Except it doesn't change my perception at all. My previous perception of Marissa Mayer was that she was a "work hard, not smart" overachiever who has become more known for her ability to make her numbers (like how long she works a week, how many weeks of maternity leave she takes, how many extra jobs around the office she piles on her plate, etc.) look good than to actually produce results. My perception was that Yahoo's board, in its infinite incompetence, hired her purely because she was infamous at Google for her work ethic (yet clearly didn't get the memo from Google as to why she wasn't moving further up the ranks), expecting her mere presence at Yahoo to turn the company around.
This "stunt," as you call it, did nothing to change that. In fact, it makes me have even less faith in Yahoo. How great do Yahoo's investors feel that their CEO is spending her time on trying to be designer instead of streamlining and turning her company around.
The one part of Yahoo's brand that was at least MILDLY interesting was its personality. I mean, the name is based on someone screaming! The new logo makes it look like they should change their name to "Ahem" or "::Clears Throat Politely::" Which brings me to my final point that, what scares me most about this logo redesign is that Mayer clearly doesn't understand her own company's brand perception. She had the opportunity to hone in on what makes Yahoo great and let that quirkiness shine, but instead she took a zamboni to her brand in a failed attempt to make a more "mature" look. If Mayer was so excited about literally tilting an exclamation point 9 degrees to the right as some sort of liberating self-expression, can you imagine how up-tight people must be over there now?
How great do Yahoo's investors feel that their CEO is spending her time on trying to be designer instead of streamlining and turning her company around.
Yahoo! Stock:
Oct. 22 2012: $15.77
March 18 2013: 22.01
June 24 2013: $24.07
July 16 2013: $26.88 Marissa appointed
July 18 2013: $29.66
Sept. 5th 2013: 28.23
I'm not sure how commentators are extrapolating that this is the sole focus of Marissa as CEO.
If Mayer was so excited about literally tilting an exclamation point 9 degrees to the right as some sort of liberating self-expression, can you imagine how up-tight people must be over there now?
Perhaps, as the GP states, she is appealing to the demographic needed to drive business versus its shareholders.
You are, perhaps, not the right audience. Imagine a recruiter at Yahoo talking to a "rockstar dev" with an awesome Github profile about why he should join Yahoo. His pitch is now "Look, we even let an intern and the CEO design our logo! That's how you'll be treated as employee - someone who can make an impact in a big business...just like, ya know, that other company that begins with G"
That's actually a good point but they could probably find a less important way to prove that point (the interaction between the CEO and the intern) than on a logo (which as part of a branding strategy is very important).
> How great do Yahoo's investors feel that their CEO is spending her time on trying to be designer instead of streamlining and turning her company around.
Depends how it turns out. Steve Jobs spent a lot of time on details, with the argument that one guiding vision has value. If it works, you're a visionary.
Except Steve wasn't a designer and he knew that. We all know Jony Ive, his work, and have watched the videos that put the spotlight completely on him and his creations. Did Steve have a lot of input? Definitely. Was he spending weekends tweaking AutoCAD files and making prototypes? No (at least, not that I know of). Delegation is a huge part of good management, and it is a skill that Mayer has shown to lack on numerous occasions.
"How great do Yahoo's investors feel that their CEO is spending her time on trying to be designer instead of"
Agree. There was a story in a book regarding Henry Kravis of KKR (I think it was Barbarians at the Gate) where he fired the President of a hotel chain he had acquired when he merely asked him his opinion of the new signage (or logo don't remember exactly but it was something like that).
I'd say the most annoying part (of so many annoying parts) was when he says:
"The hard part is defining what your brand is and what it aims to become."
And then somehow supports that with the opposite:
"Is Yahoo “whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh […] human, personal […] proud”? Currently, Yahoo is not associated with being whimsical or sophisticated, rather it is mostly boring and dull. It doesn’t portray modernity or freshness, it feels obsolete and dated."
Apparently had he been hired, he'd have designed a logo to what he believes are Yahoo's current brand - dullness and obsolescence instead of what he suggested at the outset which is what you want your brand to be.
Did eBay's new logo get this criticized? Because it's infinitely worse. Then again, the CEO probably didnt work on i, which seems to be the major gripe.
For me spending weeks and months of valuable time achieving a utopian logo would be the greater waste.
I personally am very supportive of this let's get everyone we need to in the room and lets get it done approach. It bodes well for how MM might go about solving larger issues facing the company.
131 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadI hate to bring up Google, but they've done pretty well despite having a history of logos no self-respecting agency would ever produce.
I don't think we have to bring up Google. In fact, we don't even have to go beyond Yahoo. For all the talk on design and building a strong visual identity, Yahoo in its glory days was visually atrocious. And it didn't mater a lick.
Whereas branding is more important in an industry where products are similar to one another in function, like consumer goods.
Does this mean the logo will perform better than one a design student made over the weekend? No.
Do many months of work prevent a failure? No.
In the end, Yahoo wants profit through revenue through site usage through loyal users. Does letter spacing have an influence on this? I doubt it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6327544
... and rather more famously, he designed the IBM logo, which is arguably one of the most famous and well-respected logos in history.
http://www.paul-rand.com/foundation/identity
I'd be interested in some blind study: Give some top notch designers a logo of a real, say, investment bank, from a foreign country, and an alternative proposal from a design student, and let them explain which is the real one and why. Has anyone ever seen such a study?
>> Is it?
Yes. People will bitch about your logo whether you paid $100mn for it or hacked it over the weekend. Logos, like names, don't actually matter much. It is the change that is important, not the design.
(I know nothing about the author, so this is just my perception.)
Yes, there's some validity to calling out the bullshit in Mayer's fluffy post. But equally mixed in are just as many nonsense bits...
I didn't, and frankly, it seems like such a little change, I doubt many even noticed.
Changing your logo to change your brand identity is the business equivalent of buying new running shoes to start shaping up. It doesn't quite work, does it?
So I'm glad they didn't spend thousands and ten thousands of dollars on a new logo, because if the logo change is just ego stroking for the CEO, there isn't much use of spending months and awe-inspiring sums on it (like that matters).
The whole article reads like a bitter rant from the company that didn't get hired to do the work, instead of a thoughtful discussion of the logo itself (I'm not saying that iA was in the running to do the work, just that the tone is oddly hostile).
There's nothing wrong with that, per se. Plenty of agencies, SaaS companies, and service providers do it. Hell, plenty of agencies get hired to do it on behalf of their clients.
What rankles here is the tone. As you say, it reads "bitter." The author's confrontational style does him no favors. It piques our interest in his agenda (whatever it may be), rather than in his content.
I wouldn't read much into his tone. He tends to be very opinionated, and he tends to express his opinions in a fashion very much like Linus Torvalds.
And while the tone may turn some people off (myself included), it is probably the right tone and post for the target market of the OP's products.
The author is completely right on one point: "...the saying in design: 'if it looks right, it is right.'”
Here's the dirty secret: All logos are designed in a momentary collision of experience and accident. All logos are, in a sense, designed in a weekend. That doesn't mean it isn't done thoughtfully. But that huge research spend? It sometimes guides the design a little, but it's mostly there to reverse-justify the final result (and of course expense) with the client.
He's also asking us to assume the only thought Yahoo ever put into their logo and apparently, their brand, was that one 36-hour period. And the implication of course is that a large spend with an agency would result in a design that's both more calculated and less contrived.
As the author says, bullshit.
The Nike logo was designed for $35 by a graphic design student rather than an experienced firm. Phil Knight said he didn't "love" it, but it would work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoosh
Of course, learning anything is easy — just practice for 10,000 hours and you're all set!
You can't win, except perhaps by a marketing agency run by a guy who can see "purpose" in the ugliness of the very expensive London Olympics logo but not in the cheap publicity of Yahoo's "30 days of change"...
Holy fucking shit what? Could you expand on that? What did they do? How many team members? Man..
Client is a $10B company, remember.
Maybe he's A/B-ing some secondary bullshit article to see what can get better rank on HN. What's the best link bait for placating boredom and wasting attention on derivative industries suckling at the teat.
There are other CEOs who think they can do anything, and start their own space program (with an electric car company on the side).
Let's be glad there are CEOs to talk about that are doing things.
People still visit Yahoo?
On the one hand, the author is absolutely right that a good professional designer can bring things to the process that enthusiastic amateurs cannot. A really good logo doesn't just look cool, it communicates something about the nature and spirit of the company visually. It lays down a marker: "this is who we are." A designer who knows the grammar of visual communication will have a better chance of delivering that than will someone who doesn't.
On the other hand, the author sadly doesn't do a great job of arguing the above point. Rather than, say, taking some great logos and pulling them apart for us to show how they do what they do, we just hear a lot of complaints about how the way Yahoo did theirs was "unprofessional." It makes it sound like the main complaint is that Yahoo had the gall to cut designers out of the process rather than that they chose a path that was more likely to result in a crappy logo, which strikes me as a more powerful (and accurate) complaint.
In other words, outside the community of professional designers, nobody cares if Marissa Mayer hurt some designers' feelings. What they care about is how Marissa Mayer is stewarding the Yahoo brand. If you want to convince them that your way is right and her way is wrong, don't show them how her way threatens your business; show them how her way threatens her business.
His critique is about her unserious approach to the process, an approach that she then justified in a cloud of post-process rationalization. His critique is saying that if this is the way she treats the logo redesign (even celebrates the casualness of the approach) then is she actually a competent steward for the Yahoo brand.
I think it's a question worth asking and find that many of the comments here seem very focused on the debate about the merits of the logo design, rather than the question of brand management which both the piece, and thankfully your comment, at least attempt to address.
Remember, this is (putatively) a direct communication from the CEO of a large multi-billion dollar company. If it sounds breezy and informal, it is because she wanted it to sound breezy and informal. Whether or not the actual process described is breezy and informal is hard to ascertain under the fact that she wanted it to sound that way. Every sentence may be literally true, but who knows what was omitted to fit the breezy-and-informal template.
I think an awful lot of people are over-interpreting a chunk of text that probably doesn't contain anywhere near as much information as it appears to. CEOs at this scale are masters of using lots of words and appearing to say things while in fact saying either nothing at all, or saying something that bears very little resemblance to the surface.
Not to interject -- well, ok, to interject -- but isn't this completely backwards? Shouldn't you skim articles you mostly agree with, but read more intensely those you disagree with? You get less out of the former and probably know what they'll say, regardless.
I started reading, was put off by the snark and sarcasm (snark is occasionally entertaining; this wasn't), then I got to where the author was baffled that Meyer described Yahoo's identity in positive terms. Really?
I skimmed a bit after that then wrote it off as a waste of time.
What's so laughable and made me skim the article is that all of his arguments are based on tidbits of social media that described the process. It shouldn't be a newsflash that those tidbits are part of the marketing campaign themselves. I don't see how someone in the business could be taking them at face value.
I suspect that Yahoo did have a whole design and marketing process (and a large budget) around the logo redesign, and this turned the redesign into a carefully scripted story in and of itself. The stories of a CEO working over the weekend were parts of that script, probably true at the core, but embellished and certainly not revealing the whole picture.
Essentially, I found this designer's rant to be rather feeble.
And incidentally, I like the new Yahoo logo, I also pay for Yahoo premium mail (only because Yahoo is not Google, oh wait, that's Bing), but I certainly don't lionize the company.
> "This post is not about the technical quality of the logo. I am not writing about brand design, but about brand management. This is about a simple rule: Brand design follows brand management, not the other way around."
He clearly states that and how this kind of approach hurts the business. Yahoo's problem was not the logo, but who and what Yahoo is. The logo can help clearing that up if it is an integral part of the brand identity which goes back to the brand ambition, not to Mayer's personal preferences about colors and shapes.
You're absolutely right.
In my opinion, the whole point of the logo redesign had little to do with the logo and much more to do with a PR move. The logo refresh was an announcement to the world that Yahoo is no longer the pre-Mayer Yahoo.
The logo might have been a casualty of this PR stunt (I personally hate the new logo), but really, a bad logo doesn't stop people from using a product.
When I think of Google I think of search, ads, and Android, and GMail. When I think of Microsoft I think of Windows, Office and XBOX. When I think of Apple I think of the iPhone, and the iPad. When I think of Facebook I think of photos and privacy (lack thereof).
When I think of Yahoo there's no defining correlation to anything. I realize many people frequent their services - but personally Yahoo! doesn't stand out as "best" for anything, and I don't even know what direction they intend to pursue to change that perception.
No, it’s not getting attention. It’s gaining trust. Ironically, for that you need a reflective, clear, and consistent brand identity. A different logo powered by bullshit doesn’t convey identity and trustworthiness. It conveys desperation.
While the overall sentiment of the article is sound, I slightly disagree with this. First, this whole story of "creating the logo in a weekend" with an "intern who did some motion graphics to convey it's uniformity" is pure and simple, a publicity stunt, and a good one at that.[1] Personally I don't think there is an intern named Max who did that (most likely an agency), but this subtly conveys the perception of something that Yahoo is missing - innovation by small teams. The reality is that Yahoo does have a brand problem (just as MS does in the consumer-mobile space), so they have two tactics they need to implement in order to properly manage the brand:
1. Change the perception of the brand (changing the logo to match the new found brand perception is a good way to do that)
2. Create buzz around the fact that the perception has now changed.
Marissa's plan for the logo did just that. I think it's a good strategy and something Stringer Bell would have been taught in his business class.[2]
[1]-http://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/60336044815/geeking-out-o...
[2]-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbbZc2pab9k
That said, where does the 30 days of logos fit in? Just as a ramp to draw additional attention to the CEO blog post?
1) Provides an on-going set of buzz. You'll have heaps of people criticizing a lot of the logos. The PR value is absolutely massive for a 30 day event.
2) Reinforces the perception that Yahoo is open, creative and is "listening to it's users".
I was getting a bit weary of the designer-ego bashing
I don't think the designer-ego bashing was unwarranted, since I agree with the author on that premise. What the author failed to recognize is why this PR move was written this way.
I think your perspective is probably the real take away from Marissa's blog post. Looking like small agile teams together in the trenches with big decision makers is the way bold ideas come out of Yahoo makes them sound leaps and bounds ahead so many other web giants. Thanks for your take, it was inspiring.
Well, Max Ma does seem to be a real guy, who's claiming the motion graphics on his personal website:
http://maxmadesign.com/work006.html
@Maxmadesign
It sounds like to me that Max is a very gifted young Chinese designer living, studying and working in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if someone turned that into a massive PR story in itself. Max represents everything us "non-corporates" beleive - that meritocracy should ultimately win.
This "stunt," as you call it, did nothing to change that. In fact, it makes me have even less faith in Yahoo. How great do Yahoo's investors feel that their CEO is spending her time on trying to be designer instead of streamlining and turning her company around.
The one part of Yahoo's brand that was at least MILDLY interesting was its personality. I mean, the name is based on someone screaming! The new logo makes it look like they should change their name to "Ahem" or "::Clears Throat Politely::" Which brings me to my final point that, what scares me most about this logo redesign is that Mayer clearly doesn't understand her own company's brand perception. She had the opportunity to hone in on what makes Yahoo great and let that quirkiness shine, but instead she took a zamboni to her brand in a failed attempt to make a more "mature" look. If Mayer was so excited about literally tilting an exclamation point 9 degrees to the right as some sort of liberating self-expression, can you imagine how up-tight people must be over there now?
Yahoo! Stock: Oct. 22 2012: $15.77 March 18 2013: 22.01 June 24 2013: $24.07 July 16 2013: $26.88 Marissa appointed July 18 2013: $29.66 Sept. 5th 2013: 28.23
I'm not sure how commentators are extrapolating that this is the sole focus of Marissa as CEO.
If Mayer was so excited about literally tilting an exclamation point 9 degrees to the right as some sort of liberating self-expression, can you imagine how up-tight people must be over there now?
Perhaps, as the GP states, she is appealing to the demographic needed to drive business versus its shareholders.
You are, perhaps, not the right audience. Imagine a recruiter at Yahoo talking to a "rockstar dev" with an awesome Github profile about why he should join Yahoo. His pitch is now "Look, we even let an intern and the CEO design our logo! That's how you'll be treated as employee - someone who can make an impact in a big business...just like, ya know, that other company that begins with G"
Depends how it turns out. Steve Jobs spent a lot of time on details, with the argument that one guiding vision has value. If it works, you're a visionary.
Agree. There was a story in a book regarding Henry Kravis of KKR (I think it was Barbarians at the Gate) where he fired the President of a hotel chain he had acquired when he merely asked him his opinion of the new signage (or logo don't remember exactly but it was something like that).
"The hard part is defining what your brand is and what it aims to become."
And then somehow supports that with the opposite:
"Is Yahoo “whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh […] human, personal […] proud”? Currently, Yahoo is not associated with being whimsical or sophisticated, rather it is mostly boring and dull. It doesn’t portray modernity or freshness, it feels obsolete and dated."
Apparently had he been hired, he'd have designed a logo to what he believes are Yahoo's current brand - dullness and obsolescence instead of what he suggested at the outset which is what you want your brand to be.
TADA!
We ARE a whimsical company, yay for fooling all of you!