Yahoo (2019)Copied

Yahoo's previous logo arrived in 2013. In 2019 the company made the first significant change since then, under an internal codename, Project Purple, and a strategy its designers summarised as simplicity and amplification. The goal was to recapture the exuberance of a brand named after an exclamation of joy.

The new wordmark is set in Centra No.2 Extrabold, with the letters modified to be more geometric and compact. The exclamation mark stays italic, as it has been in every version since the founding, and the y and ! are set at the same 22-degree-plus angle, a quiet nod to the jumpy, offset 1996 logo. A y! monogram covers favicons and social icons. Purple, Yahoo's colour since 2003, is refreshed into a bright primary the designers called grape jelly, backed by secondary purples nicknamed hulk pants and malbec.

Design Week and The Verge both credit Pentagram, with partner Michael Bierut leading alongside Britt Cobb. Bierut said the team first tried updating the 1996 logo and found it only looked childish, so the aim became to recapture the spirit, not the appearance. Yahoo's design lead Jim Bosiljevac said the logo had to work across hundreds of uses, from TV screens to building signage, and that the team tested hundreds of designs. The launch coincided with a reimagined Yahoo Mail app.

Reaction leaned sceptical. The Verge headlined it as a logo to remind you Yahoo exists, said it lacked the personality of the 2013 design and looked like a startup's first subway ad, and recounted the Mayer era that ended with the sale to Verizon. A Visual Objects survey of 1,000 Americans reported by Creative Bloq found 58 percent still preferred the old logo.

The Verge was unsparing. It read the logo as a company shouting that it still existed, and found it had less personality than the 2013 Marissa Mayer era design, a lowercase sans that could pass for a startup's first subway campaign. The only distinctive move was the exclamation point, now pitched at 22.5 degrees like the y, which Pentagram described as forward momentum and The Verge read as trying to run away from the rest of the word. Context did not help: Tumblr and Flickr sold, the TV ambitions gone, the company owned by Verizon, and Yahoo Mail still shadowed by the 2013 breach of all three billion accounts.

It is a confident, legible correction of the 2013 mark, and the shared angle is the kind of detail that makes a simple logo feel considered. It is also a little generic; it reads more like a well-run media company than a quirky web pioneer. For Yahoo in 2019, that may have been the point.