Yahoo CEO forced to defend new logo

By Creative Bloq Staff
published

The Yahoo logo controversy won't go away. Here's Marissa Mayer's answer to the less than diplomatic question: "What the **** happened with the logo?"

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, a new one on a daily basis.

New logo: Cleaned up while retaining many familiar elements

New logo: Cleaned up while retaining many familiar elements

This campaign could be said to have slightly backfired, in the sense that polls indicate the public largely preferred the 'Day 10' logo over the final, permanent logo, which is based on Optima.

Mayer defended the choice in a blog post in which she described how she and a team created the new logo over the course of a weekend. But this incensed some 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.

OLD LOGO: The dancing letters of old are gone

OLD LOGO: The dancing letters of old are gone

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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Creative Bloq Staff

The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of seven full-time members of staff: Editor Georgia Coggan, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Deals Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Digital Arts and Design Editor Ian Dean, Tech Reviews Editor Erlingur Einarsson and Ecommerce Writer Abi Le Guilcher, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq. 

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