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Yahoo showed us 30 days of logos. Here’s the one consumers liked best

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Re: Yahoo showed us 30 days of logos. Here’s the one consumers liked best

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps familiarity is in fact part of the definition of the "best "logo. After all, a logo serves no other purpose than recognition. Companies routinely spend a great deal of money ensuring that their logo, colors, interior decor, etc etc, all make people go "Oh yeah! That's [X]!"

Precisely. What if they had shown the logos in different colors, with a different word, with different styles?

In which case the question would be the wrong one to ask. It doesn't really matter which logo people "prefer" - their personal aesthetic taste has nothing to do with an effective logo (well, assuming your logo isn't goatse).

It would be more effective to ask people what descriptors they'd use to describe the company behind the logo, using a fictional company name.

The rest is millions of dollars of marketing.

Re: Yahoo showed us 30 days of logos. Here’s the one consumers liked best

#52
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. And they only tested 5 logos picked at random from the first 28 that Yahoo presented. They may not even have picked the "best" 5 out of that lot. So really... this whole blog post was click bait. I'd never heard of Survata before... but now I have... for better or worse.

The way I understand it, each user surveyed got five random logos, but not the same ones. Over the entire population, all the logos were surveyed and the "winningest" ones are presented as the highest rank (see the last chart with the full matrix of which logos won against which others).

Ah. They could have worded that a little different then. It did sound as though they picked 5 logos and then surveyed the people. I can see it the other way now as well. I've never known a survey to be run like that. Seems odd to me.

Re: Yahoo showed us 30 days of logos. Here’s the one consumers liked best

#54
I think the weirdest thing about Yahoo's logo is the color. It wasn't until I started working for Yahoo that I first heard that the corporate colors were purple and yellow[1], later changed to purple and white.

The logo on Yahoo.com was -- from birth until around 2008 or so -- red. That was the color everybody outside of Yahoo knew. But inside the company everything that could be a color was purple, people were emotionally invested in it, and debate raged on getting Jerry and Filo (who were apparently the holdouts on red) to change the home page logo to purple.

It seems to me very emblematic of Yahoo that they chose their corporate color first entirely at random and then hung on to it forever out of sentimentality. That's the kind of place Yahoo is: fuzzy and loving but not terribly sensible, business-wise.

Changing the logo is a cliché for a struggling company that doesn't have a lot of new ideas. I actually don't think that's true of Marissa Mayer; a whole bunch of her ideas are along the lines of "do whatever Google did", but then Google is very successful, and at least part of what Yahoo needs to do is get better at the things that Google is already good at. But the acquisition-frenzy in mobile seems smarter, and the acquisition of Tumblr smarter still. Time will tell whether it's enough to turn the ship around.

But I still think it's weird that the corporate color is purple.

[1] Chosen essentially at random because they were the cheapest paints available when they painted their first offices. Purple and yellow do not go together at ALL, incidentally.

Re: Yahoo showed us 30 days of logos. Here’s the one consumers liked best

#56

The winner seems very similar to the old logo, sans serifs. I wonder if the proper conclusion is that this is the best new logo, or that this is simply the most familiar.

A great victory has been won this day in the name of sans serif fonts.

Re: Yahoo showed us 30 days of logos. Here’s the one consumers liked best

#58
This reminds me of Komar and Melamid's Most Wanted Painting series, where they surveyed[1] residents of various countries to find aesthetic preferences, and then made the paintings[2] that should appeal and repulse those residents the most.

[1] http://awp.diaart.org/km/surveyresults.html [2] http://awp.diaart.org/km/painting.html

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