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Once the main gateway to the internet, AOL had struggled to stay relevant, as the Christian Science Monitor put it. In December 2009 it was spinning off from Time Warner as an independent company, while asking 2,500 employees to volunteer for layoffs. Chief executive Tim Armstrong wanted to turn it into a next-generation media company built on its 80 or so blogs and content sites.

Wolff Olins was hired that summer. The result, previewed in November, replaced AOL with 'Aol.': a simple sans serif in mixed case with a full stop, placed over ever-changing images. The company called it one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal it. Launch examples included a goldfish, a leaf, a shoe, a neon green scribble, a paint swirl and an upraised hand; the New York Times reported hundreds of images ready to roll out over the following months. Wolff Olins chief executive Karl Heiselman argued that brand identity had historically been monolithic and controlling, little more than stamping a company name on a product.

Armstrong called the identity uniquely dynamic and centred on creative people, employees, partners and advertisers. It was fully unveiled on 10 December 2009, when AOL stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The reaction ran from intrigue to bafflement, with Business Insider listing the goldfish and paint swirl with barely hidden amusement.

The Guardian gathered the early verdicts, and they were brutal. One London designer liked the idea of an adaptive logo but called this the literal, cliched first idea you put on a moodboard and then throw away. Om Malik called it ambiguous at best. Oliver Reichenstein argued that radical identity changes signal something wrong with a company, and that AOL's original business, internet access, was obsolete; if the aim was to show the brand vanishing from the digital surface, job well done. Tim Armstrong had said the launch would be very inexpensive, with marketing money going into product instead.

It became a landmark of the flexible-identity era, and its flaw is the era's flaw. The idea that a brand is a frame for content suited a media company. But the wordmark itself is anonymous, and a logo that can be anything stands for nothing in particular. It looked like confidence and functioned like indecision.