Yahoo! Brand Refresh 2019
Yahoo! Brand Refresh 2019
Yahoo brand refresh 2019 is a strategic move for by the company to reconnect with its existing user base and to acquire potential new users.
It’s interesting to see popular brands adopting more modern & minimalistic approach in their branding. Volkswagen did a similar brand refresh this year which I covered up in my previous blog post.
If you run a business or own a brand and are looking for a modern minimalistic brand identity head over to my logo design service page to order my design service.
OK, so now that I am done with my shameless self-promotion lets see what Pentagram created for Yahoo!
Yahoo! which has been one of the pioneering web portal and search engine on the internet once used to be a household name when it came to email and web search. I still remember that I created my first email on Yahoo! mail. Sadly this popularity slowly declined as the competitors like Google gained more popularity.
Designers of Yahoo! Brand Refresh 2019
The world-renowned design firm Pentagram collaborated closely with the leadership at Yahoo! on the rebrand project. The project was headed by Pentagram partner Michael Bierut with a project team of Britt Cobb & Abby Matousek.
The identity appears in purple, Yahoo’s signature color since 2003. (Internally, the rebranding was called “Project Purple.”) The designers refined the palette and made it more contemporary, selecting a primary purple (a bright shade they called “grape jelly”) and secondary purples (“hulk pants” and “malbec”), as well as accent colors.
The new wordmark is set in Centra No. 2 Extrabold, and the letters of the logotype have been modified to be more geometric and compact. The exclamation mark has been italicized for emphasis, as it has been in every iteration of the logo since the company’s founding. The “y” and “!” of the logo are both set at an angle of 22.5 degrees, a forward tilt that suggests a sense of momentum and excitement. The angle––precisely 1/16th of a circle––is the basis for visual language built around angles and incremental slices.
Taking from Infancy to adulthood.
Yahoo!’s original look was representative of the oddities of the early internet, but as Bierut says: “The internet quickly grew out of infancy into adulthood, but Yahoo was still dressed in kids’ clothes.”
Yahoo responded to this with a rebrand 2009 & 2013. The 2013 design was how the company appeared when Bierut and his team were tasked with their redesign.
“We wanted to find a way to recapture the spirit of Yahoo’s lost youth, without looking childish,” says Bierut. The team originally began with the idea of just tweaking Yahoo’s original 1996 logo. But they soon ran into trouble when they found it couldn’t be updated without appearing “childish” or “cartoon-like”.
Reimagined Icon / Favicon / Monogram
The logo has been optimized to work across various platforms and scales, from the small canvas of a mobile app to the side of a building. The identity is further streamlined with a simple “y!” monogram, useful for favicons and social media icons.
The “y” and “!” of the logo are both set at an angle of 22.5 degrees, a forward tilt that suggests a sense of momentum and excitement. The angle––precisely 1/16th of a circle––is the basis for visual language built around angles and incremental slices.
The monogram is also the foundation for a cohesive brand architecture that locks up the “y!” with various channels to create sub-brands for Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Entertainment, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Mail etc.
The strategy positions Yahoo as an “amplification brand,” amplifying the things that matter, helping to “amplify you.” The idea is neatly visualized in Yahoo’s exclamation point, a punctuation mark that literally stands for amplification.
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