If and when you get divorced (REAL TALK), it’s not enough to simply change your name, get a facial, and call it a day. You have to really transform yourself to 1) show your ex what he’s missing out on, and 2) feel like a rock star. That means going to the gym and losing 20 pounds, getting a new haircut and wardrobe, and hanging out with new people.
Yahoo is doing all of that. The company has been on a roll with redesigns of its homepage, email, news page, and updates to Flickr. The only thing left, really, is Yahoo’s logo. The company announced early Wednesday morning that it will be redesigning Yahoo’s logo in a campaign called “30 Days of Change.” Each day will feature a different logo design, and the real redesigned logo will be unveiled on September 4 at 9 pm.
“Over the past year, there’s been a renewed sense of purpose and progress at Yahoo!, and we want everything we do to reflect this spirit of innovation. While the company is rapidly evolving, our logo — the essence of our brand — should too,” wrote Chief Marketing Officer Kathy Savitt, in a blog post. “The new logo will be a modern redesign that’s more reflective of our reimagined design and new experiences.”
The new logo (and each new variation over the next 30 days) will keep the company’s official color purple as well as its iconic exclamation point, as well as the yodel. Today’s logo is a cleaned up, neater version, but there are a number of new logos in the pipe, as you can see in the video below.
It’s been four years since the company last updated its logo, changing it from its longstanding red to purple. Even though the company’s official color has always been purple, Yahoo reportedly shied away from making its logo purple because the color didn’t show up well on monitors in the early ‘90s.
Finally, after 14 years of the wrong color, Yahoo changed its logo to purple in 2009. (Now I’m left wondering why Yahoo didn’t just change its corporate color to red. Allegedly, the corporate color was decided back in ’96 when co-founder David Filo got a great deal on lavender paint for Yahoo’s offices.)
Prior to that, the last significant logo change was in 1996. If you back even further than that, there was the original Jumping Y Guy.
There has been a lot of change at Yahoo over the last year, since Marissa Mayer took the helm as CEO. First and foremost, company culture was strengthened. Mayer killed telecommuting and offered a range of perks to make Yahoo the next great place to work, including free meals in the cafeteria, free iPhones for all, and free Jawbone UP health monitoring devices.
Upon stepping into the role of CEO, Mayer said that Yahoo’s success would come in a series of sprints. The first sprint was strengthened culture. The current spring, she said at Yahoo’s last quarterly earnings call, is all about product and expansion.
“Products are what drives traffic,” said Mayer, who highlighted several of Yahoo’s most game-changing product releases and updates, including the Yahoo Weather app, which is now the number one weather app in the App Store. And since revamping Yahoo Mail, daily active user traffic is up 120% on mobile.
Additionally, since updating Flickr, daily photo uploads are up 3X.
Altogether, monthly mobile users across all of Yahoo’s apps have surpassed 340 million. And Yahoo has shut down over 30 underutilized products in the last year.
What’s next for Yahoo? Mayer said the company will be making investments in video over the next year.
So while other companies are revamping their logos to give the appearance of renewed energy and drive (akin to getting a haircut because you don’t want to go to the gym), Yahoo is actually emphasizing its achievements with a new logo (getting a haircut because you broke up with your boyfriend and lost 20 pounds). Hey, Grrrrrl!
