There are few brands that evoke feelings of the old internet like Yahoo; an early portal to news, weather, sports, and everything else. Yahoo was once the dominant player in search, but today it’s the third-largest player in the space. The company holds about a 3 percent market share, which is behind No. 2 Bing (5 percent) and Google (88 percent). Now, Yahoo has partnered with the design consultancy Pentagram. Together they’ve unveil Yahoo’s third logo redesign since launching the brand more than 24 years ago. 

“As with the original logo, the new identity captures the voice of a brand named after an exclamation of joy and discovery, and still looks like it should be shouted or yodelled — ‘yahoOOOOoooo!’” says Pentagram.

The redesign, which is meant to convey a more “exuberant” personality, also signals a strategic change for the company as it prepares to introduce other products and services including a reconstructed Yahoo Mail app. This is the most significant change to the brand’s logo since the last one was unveiled back in 2013. For the design team, the rebranding process meant identifying the strongest characteristics of the old Yahoo brand worth preserving.

The first significant change since 2013

The new identity is crisp and friendly, with thick and curvy letterforms. Its main surprise is its exclamation point, which is slanted like an italic; that slanted angle sits at 22.5 degrees — and it recurs throughout the new branding. The previous Sans Serif font has been ditched for Centra No. 2 Extra Bold and the letters, now all lower case, have been modified to be more geometric and compact, Pentagram says. The company started working on the logo last March alongside Yahoo’s creative team, taking nearly two months to create a design that looked like the final logo.

“We then spent the summer refining it and making sure it performed across the company’s platforms.”

The redesigned logo will either appears white against a purple surface or purple against a white surface to allude to Yahoo’s signature colour. This time though, the palette is a bright shade of purple known as “grape jelly” for the primary colour. For those who still remember the old internet, it’s encouraging to see that a bit of its spirit still remains. Viewers can take a look at the different forms the new logo takes as they’re unveiled, heralding a new era for Yahoo.

Source: https://adage.com/article/digital/yahoos-new-logo-yodels-yahooooooooo/2199606