Yahoo

Yahoo’s wordmark had been slightly odd purple type with an exclamation point since the 1990s. The 2009 version was still that drawing: heavy, a little too pleased, obviously Yahoo. You could hate it and still find it, which is more than most internet companies manage once they decide to grow up.

In August 2013 they announced thirty days of alternate logos on the homepage. Purple, the bang, and the yodel would stay. On 5 September the “real” one arrived. Marissa Mayer later wrote that she had sat with the design team and an intern over a weekend in Illustrator. The result was an all-caps geometric sans, no straight lines, a custom ! that tried to keep a family resemblance.

A month of costumes, then a Sunday mark

The internet treated the process as the story, and the process deserved it. Thirty days of costumes is a way of saying the old drawing was already dead. A weekend in Illustrator is a way of saying the new one did not need to be laboured over. The Verge ran both chapters. Neither chapter produced letters with the same weight as 2009.

The old weight sat funny. The exclamation was a little too pleased. That was Yahoo. Keeping purple is not the same as keeping that. A custom bang on a geometric sans is a souvenir. The 2009 mark was a personality. You can flatten personality until it will sit on a phone. You cannot then point at the purple and claim you kept the company.

In 2019 they changed the letters again. The 2009 drawing did not come back either time. Later Yahoos have stayed in the sans family. Once you leave a drawing that odd, going back looks like a reunion tour. Companies almost never book those.

Odd is a legitimate brand strategy

Google dropped Catull two years later for the same reason Yahoo dropped the fat purple: devices, systems, a wish to look like the present. Instagram is now in the same neighbourhood, tightening a script until the r behaves like a z. The present, as a visual target, has a way of making every company look like every other company. Yahoo already looked like Yahoo. That is a solved problem. They unsolved it on a weekend.

A portal that had been part of how people learned the web did not need to become a well-mannered geometric. It needed to keep being slightly too much. The yodel could stay. The bang could stay. Without the letters that made those things belong to Yahoo, they are props.

• Yahoo reveals its new logo, The Verge, 5 September 2013
• Yahoo counts down to new logo with different designs every day, Jeff Blagdon, The Verge, 7 August 2013