If you believe the maxim that all publicity is good publicity then it's been a good couple of months for Yahoo and its CEO Marissa Mayer.
Mayer, one of 20 original employees in the early days of Google, was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo in July last year and has wasted no time in stamping her authority on the company.
Her latest scheme was dubbed '30 days of Yahoo logos' in which she drummed up excitement over the launch of a new logo design by releasing, er, 29 other logos (opens in new tab), a new one on a daily basis.
This campaign could be said to have slightly backfired, in the sense that polls indicate the public largely preferred the 'Day 10' logo (opens in new tab) over the final, permanent logo (opens in new tab), which is based on Optima.
Defending the logo
Mayer defended the choice in a blog post (opens in new tab) in which she described how she and a team created the new logo over the course of a weekend. But this incensed some (opens in new tab) professional designers and typographers with sentences like "We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark," that left many baffled.
So in her latest interview (above), at a TechCrunch event, Mayer was forced to answer the less than diplomatic question: "What the **** happened here?" to jeers from the audience.
In answer, she said "I like the way the logo turned out and I like the way we did it." To put it in context she described Yahoo as "the world's biggest startup" and said: "We need to be really entrepreneurial and our attitude is to be really scrappy.
"The way we did the logo, we kept it in-house, we didn't have an external consulting firm," she continued. "We didn't spend millions of dollars doing it. We did it in a way that came from a very authentic place. What the brand is really about is having the best products and that's what we really wanted to shine through."
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What do you make of Yahoo's new logo? Let us know in the comments below!
