Will Users Accept Yahoo’s First New Logo In 18 Years?

Early last month, Yahoo announced that it would be changing its logo, and kicked off thirty days of showing a different design each day. Now, the real new logo has been unveiled, and here it is. It started rolling out last night.

What do you think of the new Yahoo logo? Improvement or not? Let us know in the comments.

On the home page, the exclamation point even dances around (we’ll see if that’s permanent or just a celebratory gesture).

While I personally don’t have a huge problem with it (it’s certainly better than the majority of the logos they’ve been using for the past month), many are less than impressed.

Yahoo promised the new logo would be “a modern design,” so the company probably isn’t very excited about TechCrunch’s assessment calling it a “GeoCities logo“.

Yahoo, of course, killed GeoCities about four years ago.

This is the first time in 18 years Yahoo has updated its logo, so it’s hard to say that some change wasn’t in order. Yahoo has desperately tried to revitalize its brand for years, and has arguably made its biggest mark over the past year since Marissa Mayer has taken over.

“Our brand, as represented by the logo, has been valued at as much as ~$10 billion dollars,” she says. “So, while it was time for a change, it’s not something we could do lightly.”

A logo redesign is an important decision for any company, let alone one the size of Yahoo. You know Yahoo even surpassed Google as the top web property in the U.S. in July?

It turns out that Mayer had a direct hand in the design. She had this to say in a blog post:

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: Bob Stohrer, Marc DeBartolomeis, Russ Khaydarov, and our intern Max Ma. We spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday designing the logo from start to finish, and we had a ton of fun weighing every minute detail.

She notes that they didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo, because they don’t exist in the human form, and are “extremely rare in nature.” They also wanted letters with thicker and thinner strokes and “scallops” on the ends of the letters to replace the old serif font.

“Our existing logo felt like the iconic Yahoo yodel. We wanted to preserve that and do something playful with the OO’s,” Mayer says. “We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark.”

Here’s the blueprint with all the notes they made about the font:

Did you put this much thought into your own company’s logo?

According to Mayer, 87% of the company’s employees wanted a change in the logo. It will be interesting to see how users react over time. Here are some early reactions:

Your turn. Tell us what you think.