Yahoo! Rebrand – Adam Augustyn

REBRANDING A TECH GIANT

A New Direction

Months after appointing new CEO Marissa Mayer (ex-Google) and on the coat tails of winning an Apple Design Award for their newly designed Weather App, it was time for Yahoo! to plant a new firm foot in the ground and update their identity to align with the new direction of the company. Yahoo's new aim under Mayer was a strong push into mobile apps, her goal was to make the world's daily habits more inspiring and entertaining. Myself and the brand team set out to shed some of the quirkiness of the original identity, and bring more relevant sophistication, all while maintaing elements of Yahoo!'s personality and character.

REBRANDING A TECH GIANT

A New Direction

Months after appointing new CEO Marissa Mayer (ex-Google) and on the coat tails of winning an Apple Design Award for their newly designed Weather App, it was time for Yahoo! to plant a new firm foot in the ground and update their identity to align with the new direction of the company. Yahoo's new aim under Mayer was a strong push into mobile apps, her goal was to make the world's daily habits more inspiring and entertaining. Myself and the brand team set out to shed some of the quirkiness of the original identity, and bring more relevant sophistication, all while maintaing elements of Yahoo!'s personality and character.

NEW BRAND TENNANTS

Yahoo! Brand Book

To establish the new vision for Yahoo!, we needed to put it in writing. The brand team worked closely with the C-Suite and senior leadership teams to develop new tennants for the brand. These became solidified in the creation of a brand book for the company.

NEW BRAND TENNANTS

Yahoo! Brand Book

To establish the new vision for Yahoo!, we needed to put it in writing. The brand team worked closely with the C-Suite and senior leadership teams to develop new tennants for the brand. These became solidified in the creation of a brand book for the company.

LOGO EXPLORATION

What Makes Yahoo! so Yahoo?

I lead and managed teams of both branding designers in the NYC office, and the marketing - advertising art directors in the Sunnyvale, CA Headquarters, all who contributed concepts for
the new identity. Lots of great ideas were genrated, which brought lots of excitement and attention within the walls of the company. Being an irreverant brand, Yahoo! capitilized on the excitement and turned our team's explorations into a 30 day identity launch, teasing a new logo concept each day during the month of August 2013, launching the new final identity on Septermber 1st.

LOGO EXPLORATION

What Makes Yahoo! so Yahoo?

I lead and managed teams of both branding designers in the NYC office, and the marketing - advertising art directors in the Sunnyvale, CA Headquarters, all who contributed concepts for the new identity. Lots of great ideas were genrated, which brought lots of excitement and attention within the walls of the company. Being an irreverant brand, Yahoo! capitilized on the excitement and turned our team's explorations into a 30 day identity launch, teasing a new logo concept each day during the month of August 2013, launching the new final identity on Septermber 1st.

LOGO EXPLORATION

What Makes Yahoo!
so Yahoo?

I lead and managed teams of both branding designers in the NYC office, and the marketing - advertising art directors in the Sunnyvale, CA Headquarters, all who contributed concepts for
the new identity. Lots of great ideas were genrated, which brought lots of excitement and attention within the wall of Yahoo. Being an irreverant company, Yahoo! capitilized on the excitement and turned our team's explorations into a 30 day identity launch, teasing a new logo concept each day during the month of August 2013, launching the new final identity on Septermber 1st.

CEO GETS HER HANDS DIRTY

Geeking Out on the Logo

Marissa Mayer

"We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo - whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud.

Other elements fell quickly into place:

We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.
We preferred letters that had thicker and thinner strokes - conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do.
Serifs were a big part of our old logo. It felt wrong to give them up altogether so we went for a sans serif font with “scallops” on the ends of the letters.
Our existing logo felt like the iconic Yahoo yodel. We wanted to preserve that and do something playful with the OO’s.
We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark.
We toyed with lowercase and sentence case letters. But, in the end, we felt the logo was most readable when it was all uppercase, especially on small screens."

CEO GETS HER HANDS DIRTY

Geeking Out on the Logo

Marissa Mayer

"We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo - whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud.

Other elements fell quickly into place:

We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.
We preferred letters that had thicker and thinner strokes - conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do.
Serifs were a big part of our old logo. It felt wrong to give them up altogether so we went for a sans serif font with “scallops” on the ends of the letters.
Our existing logo felt like the iconic Yahoo yodel. We wanted to preserve that and do something playful with the OO’s.
We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark.
We toyed with lowercase and sentence case letters. But, in the end, we felt the logo was most readable when it was all uppercase, especially on small screens."

"Our last move was to tilt the exclamation point by 9 degrees, just to add a bit of whimsy.

Prior to the weekend, we had also polled our employees on the changes they wanted to see. Interestingly, 87% of our employees wanted some type of change in the logo (either iterative or radical). In terms of specific attributes, our employees had wanted:

sans serif
variable size letters
a variable baseline
a tilted exclamation point
and the majority of their favorite logos were uppercase.

While we hadn’t set out to explicitly fill each request, we met a lot of what the people who know us best felt suited us best.

Color and texture were pretty easy. Our purple is Pantone Violet C - a pantone that needs no number and no introduction ;). For the texture, we came up with the nice idea of creating a chiseled triangular depth to the logo - this causes the letter Y to appear in the shading at the ends of each of the letters.

Over the subsequent weeks, we’ve worked on various applications and treatments of the logo (the favicon, app launchers, sub-brand lockups).
It’s held up well. And, while moving forward we’re likely to make small iterative changes along the way rather than dramatic ones, we’re really happy with where we ended up. We hope you are too!"

"Our last move was to tilt the exclamation point by 9 degrees, just to add a bit of whimsy.

Prior to the weekend, we had also polled our employees on the changes they wanted to see. Interestingly, 87% of our employees wanted some type of change in the logo (either iterative or radical). In terms of specific attributes, our employees had wanted:

sans serif
variable size letters
a variable baseline
a tilted exclamation point
and the majority of their favorite logos were uppercase.

While we hadn’t set out to explicitly fill each request, we met a lot of what the people who know us best felt suited us best.

Color and texture were pretty easy. Our purple is Pantone Violet C - a pantone that needs no number and no introduction ;). For the texture, we came up with the nice idea of creating a chiseled triangular depth to the logo - this causes the letter Y to appear in the shading at the ends of each of the letters.

Over the subsequent weeks, we’ve worked on various applications and treatments of the logo (the favicon, app launchers, sub-brand lockups). It’s held up well. And, while moving forward we’re likely to make small iterative changes along the way rather than dramatic ones, we’re really happy with where we ended up. We hope you are too!"

"Our last move was to tilt the exclamation point by 9 degrees, just to add a bit of whimsy.

Prior to the weekend, we had also polled our employees on the changes they wanted to see. Interestingly, 87% of our employees wanted some type of change in the logo (either iterative or radical). In terms of specific attributes, our employees had wanted:

sans serif
variable size letters
a variable baseline
a tilted exclamation point
and the majority of their favorite logos were uppercase.

While we hadn’t set out to explicitly fill each request, we met a lot of what the people who know us best felt suited us best.

Color and texture were pretty easy. Our purple is Pantone Violet C - a pantone that needs no number and no introduction ;). For the texture, we came up with the nice idea of creating a chiseled triangular depth to the logo - this causes the letter Y to appear in the shading at the ends of each of the letters.

Over the subsequent weeks, we’ve worked on various applications and treatments of the logo (the favicon, app launchers, sub-brand lockups).
It’s held up well. And, while moving forward we’re likely to make small iterative changes along the way rather than dramatic ones, we’re really happy with where we ended up. We hope you are too!"

INSPIRATION

Mood & Style for the New Identity

BRAND ASSETS

New Identity System

PHOTOSHOOT WITH TY MILFORD

3 Days, 6 Locations, Los Angeles, CA

CLIENT

AGENCY

YEAR

Yahoo!

In-House Brand Team

2013

Yahoo!

In-House Brand Team

2013

MY ROLE

Brand Director

PROJECT

Identity, Brand Strategy, Brand Architecture, Photoshoot

TEAM

Marissa Mayer, Kathy Savitt, Bob Stohrer, Marc Debartelomeis, Kara Krushin, Joel Wasserman, Ryan Clifford,
Nathan Bachmann, Ryan Aquino, Jared Kozel, Russ Khaydarov, Max Ma, Brad Hall, Ivan Cayabyab

Marissa Mayer, Kathy Savitt, Bob Stohrer, Marc Debartelomeis, Kara Krushin, Joel Wasserman, Ryan Clifford, Nathan Bachmann, Ryan Aquino, Jared Kozel, Russ Khaydarov, Max Ma, Brad Hall,
Ivan Cayabyab

Marissa Mayer, Kathy Savitt, Bob Stohrer, Marc Debartelomeis, Kara Krushin, Joel Wasserman, Ryan Clifford, Nathan Bachmann, Ryan Aquino, Jared Kozel, Russ Khaydarov, Max Ma, Brad Hall, Ivan Cayabyab