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.
They are almost opposites or complementary (the complement of yellow is actually violet, not purple, but purple is close enough), so just like blue and orange.
Complementary colors used in combination give the highest contrast.
Having trouble finding the link, but I remember an article on why the founder of DailyKos settled on burnt orange. The rationale was there were already lots of shades of blue and other pleasant colors on the Internet. So while burnt orange was pretty ugly, it was at least unique and memorable. And for a blog trying to get repeat visitors, a memorable look was important.
Granted, uniqueness or memorability is no longer necessary for a company as well known as Yahoo, but there's something to be said for ugly.
My point was not so much that the color is bad, so much that the process by which the color was selected -- ignoring customer familiarity in favor of something that made employees happy -- was very characteristic of Yahoo.
I wonder if the next thing Yahoo! does is build a huge office complex. That's the thing big silicon valley companies do before they die, although Yahoo! should have done it in 2005-2007 on this timeline.
It was being discussed in 2009; http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoos-humongous-new-hq-see-i... Not sure if there's any recent news on it though. It's pretty close to the new "SF" 49'ers stadium so it was probably a good real estate move on that front.
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.