Yay or Nay on the New Yahoo! Logo?

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From some reports, CEO Marissa Mayer comes across as a micro-manager.  She has certainly seeped herself into the old culture and practices at Yahoo!, and while the results may be mixed or delayed at best, there are increasing wins, marked as feathers in her cap, for example, Yahoo beats Google in traffic for first time since 2011.

Marissa Mayer, in Vogue

Mayer even managed to sidle into Vogue, where the already attractive top leader ratchets it up on the glamorous-sexy meter.

But we digress.  Back to the new Yahoo! logo, which the company switched on at midnight yesterday.

"Marissa was an integral collaborator and force in the process," says Kathy Savitt, chief marketing officer at Yahoo. 

That's putting it mildly, apparently. 

In a post on Yahoo's recently acquired Tumblr site titled "Geeking Out on the Logo," Mayer describes the process. 

"So, one weekend this summer, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into the trenches with our logo design team: Bob Stohrer, Marc DeBartolomeis, Russ Khaydarov, and our intern Max Ma. We spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday designing the logo from start to finish, and we had a ton of fun weighing every minute detail. 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." 

The geeky part kicks in with a "blueprint of what we did, calling out some of what was cool/mathematical." 

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

That very much sounds like micro-managing, but, hey, she's the CEO and she's entitled to micro-manage however much she likes.  

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Frankly, I like the old logo better.  The new one looks quite staid, and perhaps too proper for a company wanting to tap into the lucrative younger demographics.  The old one has the right amount of whimsy, coupled with cool design.

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Something tells me that this may be like that Coca Cola snafu several years.  They toyed with a new formula, that didn't suit the taste of its consumers.  Let's see if Yahoo! reverts back to its old logo.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD