10 ms·

This is a brilliant move by Marissa Mayer. She knows from experience that having the best of the best (not only in engineering- but also in design, marketing, e

• stephencanon 13y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. To me, the new logo screams "design by committee". Its only virtue is that it addresses the worst flaws of the old logo. If we are to believe that how a company treats its logo is a reflection how it acts in all other regards (dubious at best), this would signal to a potential employee that Yahoo is an overly-cautious company that rejects big-picture rethinking and will only take on incremental adjustments to the status quo. A place where you cannot do your best work because you need to get buy in from 15 stakeholders for any significant change, and mediocre work that doesn't step on anyone's toes is the path to success. Me, I think that a logo is just a logo, and that a logo (and even a logo design process) is almost completely orthogonal to a company's ability to recruit and retain talent.
  • molecule 13y ago
    It also screams 'micromanagement.' > 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. The Yahoo! logotype was important enough to involve the CEO of a $25B company, and frivolous enough to knock out in a weekend.
    • yuhong 13y ago
      I think Marissa Mayer was famous for things like this even at Google.
    • slg 13y ago
      >The Yahoo! logotype was important enough to involve the CEO of a $25B company, and frivolous enough to knock out in a weekend. I think that combination is probably accurate, but I don't think that is a bad thing. Mayer knows that something like this isn't really in the job description of a CEO. They don't pay her the big bucks to play around in Illustrator and it isn't a efficient use of her work day. But this is something she is interested in and something she thinks is important to the new image of Yahoo. So she dedicates a weekend (as off the clock as a Fortune 500 CEO can be?) to meet with the design team and get the work done. The move actually sounds pretty calculated and smart to me. It shows that she both knows her roll in the company but will still pay attention to the details.
    • hbbio 13y ago
      She should at least spend her week end with her child.
      • sho_hn 13y ago
        Children are surprisingly capable of not falling over dead or turning into monsters even if their parents spend a little time pursuing other interests now and then, you know. Also, be honest: Would that thought have even occured to you if Yahoo! had a male CEO? If not, why not?
• anologwintermut 13y ago
  Her experience and micromanagement apparently produced a logo that looks like it belongs on a web portal framed by IE6's forward thinking UI and appears to have been designed by someone who just figured out that illustrator could do 3d effects. So, so much for making users think the company has moved beyond its stagnant products. Which in a lot of ways it has, look at the Yahoo weather app for Android, the design is modern and integrates one of Yahoo's rather under leveraged properties: flickr. That was nice design. As to signals to the best of the best, this blog post confirms both that she will micro manager you and do design by committee simultaneously (a dubious distinction I don't think even Steve Balmer could achieve). And that's the signal if they like the logo.
  • orik 13y ago
    I disagree. I liked the new logo. :(
    • kingsidharth 13y ago
      <sarcasm>Very good argument, I must say. All design decisions must be made on the basis of likes and dislikes.</sarcasm>
      • gnarbarian 13y ago
        once you reach a certain point, design /is/ largely subjective.
      • sho_hn 13y ago
        "The bevel is bad" is not a very good argument, either. Why is the bevel bad? Explain it without making a reference to current flat trends.
        • cschmidt 13y ago
          Traditional (i.e. Paul Rand era) logo design was trying to distill a company down to a minimal essence. Having bevels leaves in a decorative element that makes in non-minimal. That it should look good in 1 color is fundamental to traditional logo design. Yes, but it is going to be used on the screen 99% of the time, you say. But people who violate that rule end up with logos that are just a little bit tacky to a graphic designer.
• chavesn 13y ago
  Unfortunately, to me her post says different things: * "I work on weekends." (With a hint of "Just saying..."). * Designed in only two days. * This was personal. Talking about her love for design and "most of all" Illustrator (!?) says "It's at least partly about me." * Mixed messages. "We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo." -- yet the logo ended up with a ton of essentially straight lines. And worst of all, the new logo seems to throw out too much of the old brand, misunderstand modern design trends and logo portability (logos with depth still need to be interesting when flat), and try too hard to have weight and impact without really achieving it. For example, the saturation of the purple has been pumped up till it almost hurts your eyes. Like TV sets at Best Buy, it's attention grabbing, but it's not desirable in the long term.
  • wyclif 13y ago
    The bevel is a bad move, and looks out of place. Poor design choice. Most of the other decisions were fine.
    • pedalpete 13y ago
      I agree about the bevel. The world goes flat, but Yahoo adds texture. It is too soon to be retro-cool. Though, it may stand out amongst all the flat logo designs, I wonder if it will stand out looking old, or just be more noticeable.
      • sp332 13y ago
        Flat may be "in", but that doesn't mean literally every single thing has to be flat, or that it's the best idea for Yahoo.
• huhtenberg 13y ago
  > She knows from experience that having the best of the best is necessary for your success in tech This is simply not true. There is a metric ton of examples of "success in tech" WITHOUT "having the best of the best". Microsoft would be the prime example. Twitter - another.
  • GuiA 13y ago
    Twitter the 900 person corporation has an extremely solid team that has released countless great open source projects and keeps innovating. Microsoft the hot late 80s/90s company was where the best of the best went. Why do you think Spolsky started his career there right out of college?
    • kamaal 13y ago
      Solid teams and people get to be named solid only after they perform. You are looking at those companies after they won, but when they started and with no proven credentials against them I doubt you would have the same view about them then.
    • huhtenberg 13y ago
      > Twitter the 900 person corporation That's now. Look back to their FailWhale period. They certainly didn't have "best of the best", yet they did succeed. Though I guess you can count Arrington's constant cheer-leading as the best of marketing... but it'd still be a stretch. > Why do you think Spolsky started his career there right out of college? Because of their stock option program, why else. But that's irrelevant. Microsoft did not succeed because they had "best of the best", but because of their underhanded sales and customer entrapment tactics. Point being the company don't need "best of the best" to succeed. It's often sufficient, but it's certainly not necessary.
  • frozenport 13y ago
    When I think about software I think about C++. Microsoft's core teams are built from the best of the best. For example their compiler and even some Windows internals (somebody should tell Linus about how a driver works :-) ). Its the other thousands on the periphery that are approaching mediocrity. Although still quite profitable. If MS was a Java fun house like Yahoo, they would have tanked long ago.
• weland 13y ago
  I beg to differ. > Through these actions and posts, shes's showing how cool and fun Yahoo! is. Look, the CEO works on weekends with a small skunkworks team on designing logos, and nerds out on the subtle details like any cool designer would do. Through these actions and posts, she looks like someone I wouldn't want to work with, or for. I avoid people who claim "I am not X, but I know enough to be dangerous" like the plague they are. I've had my share of "I am not an engineer, but I know enough to be dangerous"; they're the people who think you used two decoupling caps in parallel because you couldn't find one with the right value, or who are always there to help you with an obvious and useless tip when you're debugging a program -- and then you spend five minutes explaining them why they're not even close to the problem (partly because they used some words that mean something different than what they thought they mean). And take another fifteen to gather back your focus, as a bonus. Second, if I had some work to do, the last thing I'd want is the CEO in my room. Yahoo looks like a big company, don't they have some CEO-ing to do? When you decide you want to make a career out of pushing papers and borderline lying to investors, stick to it. Third, having the CEO bug you and working weekends is a really low, indecent form of manipulation. Someone who's designs stuff for Yahoo is probably experienced enough to have gone past the "I have to work weekends to impress my boss and jumpstart my career" phase. The dudes probably had families to spend time with (or bars to hit and get drunk over the grudge of their loneliness, whatever). Let them go home, you can brag to the press about what a workaholic culture your company has without actually keeping your employees at work over the weekend. Sure, if the atmosphere is fun enough, it may seem like you're having fun and playing, but this doesn't avoid the burnout, it just makes its settling less painful. > finally was in a situation where I could watch the video, and I only feel stronger about my point. Listen to the music (some dubstep/ibiza dance/feel good summer hit hybrid) - this is clearly destined to appeal to the 21 year old Stanford student looking for a new job, not the guy on HN who will criticize anything that makes it to the front page. This is clearly destined to appeal to the ambitious, 21-year hipster who wants to be a corporate drone but with style, you know, like he's not a corporate drone. Job-desperate, loan-starved young graduates who want to subscribe to the 70 hours a week -- but oh so fun -- culture. I don't think they are to be condemned (we were all pretty stupid when we were 21), but someone who perpetuates this culture isn't to be admired and certainly not made an example of, not among tech professionals anyway. Among Wall Street investors? Sure, who the hell wouldn't admire someone who can make people work over weekends and proud of it. Also -- at the risk of doing a sexist no-no -- I can't help but wonder how someone like, say, Steve Ballmer, which I guess no one around here wants to do, would have been treated if he were the one treating his employees like this -- micromanaging exactly the people you shouldn't micromanage (i.e. the creative team), over a weekend, then bragging about how hip it is. Breathing life into a company is a difficult task, and Marissa Mayer seems to be trying to do exactly that. Initial success is obviously to be applauded, but don't be overly enthusiastic. The smith's fire will eat through the coals and make the iron unworkable if you overwork the bellows.
• petercooper 13y ago
  This is a brilliant move by Marissa Mayer. In some ways, but I think Yahoo! has essentially proven their brand is so weak that it can be represented by a new poorly thought out design every day and, well, no-one cares. If Apple, McDonald's or Coca Cola did something similar, they'd be committing brand suicide and attracting a lot of flak, but with Yahoo it's just "Oh well, another new Yahoo logo, who cares?"
  • goblin89 13y ago
    > If Apple, McDonald's or Coca Cola did something similar, they'd be committing brand suicide and attracting a lot of flak I remember Apple's iOS 7 Video, where some guy was geeking out about the grid they've designed and are using for everything, from icons to UI layout. > but with Yahoo it's just "Oh well, another new Yahoo logo, who cares?" To be fair, Yahoo didn't change logo for 18 years, according to the OP. It's pretty big news.
• tlrobinson 13y ago
  This might be true if the logo were actually good, but it's not. It looks like it was designed by a machine.
• DoubleMalt 13y ago
  I disagree. The result is a brilliant demonstration on why design by committee is bad.
• Okvivi 13y ago
  I couldn't agree more. What I feel a lot of people are missing here is that Marissa's making Yahoo a place where good engineers want to work: where empowered smart people can make a difference in a scrappy way.