Marissa Mayer On Yahoo's New Logo: "I Helped Design It"
Geege Schuman stashed this in Design
Stashed in: Steve Jobs, Google+, Yahoo!, Awesome, @marissamayer, Logos!
The marque is the first redesign of the brand's logo since 1995, and according to Yahoo CMO Kathy Savitt, represents a "significant evolution of the logo." It's still purple, with the letters of different sizes representing a yodel's soundwaves, and retains its trademark exclamation point -- but the color is a richer one, and the exclamation has gotten a more modern shape.
Ms. Mayer wrote that some of the design elements that she thought most important were that the logo shouldn't have any straight lines, because "straight lines don't exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature." Some of the elements from the old logo, like the yodel and the serifs, were also preserved, she wrote.
Ah, 1995, when Yahoo was the acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Orifice.
Wait, I see straight lines in both the A and the H. What am I missing?
And the Y. Maybe she meant "uneven in thickness".
That's imprecise wording for a designer. o_O
Steve Jobs took it to a whole other level:
But there's one story, perhaps, that's piercing because it portrays the exacting nature of Apple's former CEO. Vic Gundotra — the man behind Google +, the company's entree into social media — about an interaction with Steve Jobs.
He writes that on a Sunday morning in 2008, he received a call during a religious service. He didn't answer, but Jobs left a message saying he had something "urgent to discuss." Gundotra returned his call almost immediately:
"Hey Steve — this is Vic," I said. "I'm sorry I didn't answer your call earlier. I was in religious services, and the caller ID said unknown, so I didn't pick up."
Steve laughed. He said, "Vic, unless the Caller ID said 'GOD', you should never pick up during services".
I laughed nervously. After all, while it was customary for Steve to call during the week upset about something, it was unusual for him to call me on Sunday and ask me to call his home. I wondered what was so important?
"So Vic, we have an urgent issue, one that I need addressed right away. I've already assigned someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow," said Steve.
"I've been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I'm not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn't have the right yellow gradient. It's just wrong and I'm going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?"
The CEO of Apple — the tech visionary who revolutionized personal computers, the way we listen to music and the way we think of mobile devices — was worried about the yellow in the second "O" in Google. Needless to say the problem was fixed, and Gundotra says it taught him a lesson on leadership and "passion and attention to detail."
That is so ridiculously OCD of Steve Jobs.
Did he not have anything else that was a more important use of those five minutes?
Mr. Jobs can't answer your question. WAIT!! Why was Steve Jobs concerning himself with the typeface hues of GOOGLE?!
I wonder if he had any regrets.
"When he was Bad Steve, he didn't seem to care about the severe damage he caused to egos or emotions... suddenly and unexpectedly, he would look at something they were working on say that it 'sucked,' it was 'shit.'"
The fact is, Jobs, for all his strengths, could be a pretty awful person to work for. He was passive aggressive and aggressive aggressive.
marissamayr wrote on her tumblr:
On a personal level, I love brands, logos, color, design, and, most of all, Adobe Illustrator. I think it’s one of the most incredible software packages ever made. I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous :)
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.
Kevin Sweeney translates his tumblr:
Calling all CEOs!
Are you looking for a new and exciting way to treat your design team like complete shit? Have you considered bringing them in for the entirety of their weekend and pretending that you know how to do their job?
Not good enough you say? Why not go ahead and have the audacity to publicly speak for your team as to how much “fun” they had giving up a weekend to be micromanaged!
Ouch.
2:10 PM Sep 05 2013