Our logo through the ages

Posted October 7th, 2009 at 11:01 am by Glenn Tokunaga, Brand Management

 10 Comments / Filed in: Behind the Scenes

Don’t adjust your monitor. There’s something different about Yahoo!. Everything seems so… purple. That’s because over the past few months we’ve been quietly changing the color scheme of our logos as part of a widespread campaign that we expect to complete by mid-2010. Say goodbye to the red logos that have adorned our sites for most of our existence and say hello to purple as Yahoo! enters a new chapter in its history.

For Yahoo! employees, this isn’t new. We’ve been bleeding purple since 1996 when we anointed it as our corporate color. Why purple? Lore has it that our notoriously frugal co-founder, David Filo, got a great deal on lavender paint for our decrepit offices. But ultimately, purple evokes everything that makes working here so unique. Now we want to share that energy with you. As we give our sites a new purple glow, it seems appropriate to reflect on how far our brand has come since our beginnings in 1994. Here’s a retrospective of the Yahoo! logo and its evolution over the past 15 years.

In the beginning, Yahoo! didn’t have a logo. In fact, Yahoo! wasn’t even Yahoo!. Our cofounders, two Stanford University grad students procrastinating on their dissertations, created a directory of their favorite Web sites and called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Web.” It was simple, practical and easy to use. It wasn’t until later that year that Yahoo! became the official name of the company.

After Yahoo! went from a hobby to a start-up, we needed something to adorn our office door and company t-shirts. The jumping “Y” guy was born. Designed by David Shen, our 17th employee and the lone design guy in the office, the logo shows a person jumping for joy after finding what he needs on Yahoo!. The blue circle over which the “Y” guy is leaping represents the world. Today, the “Y” guy no longer graces our hallways and conference rooms, but if you’re lucky you might see him on a business card from an old-timer. Later that year, Shen partnered with ad agency Organic Online to design the logotype. Yahoo! needed a horizontal logo because it took up less space than the more vertical jumping “Y” guy. Shen and Organic made sure the letters rose towards the right “so that, upon reading the word, you would get a sense of rising energy with the exclamation point punctuating that energy at the end,” according to Shen. They eventually settled on Able font, which they modified and made purple.

We decided the logo on our page needed some life, so in 1995 we decided on a logo that was bright red. This wasn’t just an aesthetic choice. We also chose it because red would more reliably display across different monitors and computers, which at that time was an issue for other colors. We also liked red for its boldness.

After much tweaking and refining, we launched the red Yahoo! logo across all of our sites on January 1, 1996.

While red became the face of Yahoo! to our users, internally we were redesigning the logo. In 1996, we parted ways with the jumping “Y” guy and streamlined the logo to the now famous purple type-based version. Since then, we’ve been using the purple logo on everything from posters to cookies to the soles of flip flops that leave Yahoo! imprints in the sand.

Yahoo!’s abbreviated logo, affectionately known as the “Y-Bang” (“bang” is typesetter’s slang for exclamation point), was originally developed in 1997 for a button on the Yahoo! Toolbar that links to the front page (the full Yahoo! emblem was too wide to fit). In 2004 we partnered with ad agency Ogilvy to redesign the Y-Bang and created a version with a white “Y” inside a purple oval and a purple exclamation point next to it. The purple Y-Bang is now the official abbreviated logo that you will see throughout our sites.

Yahoo! is launching a new homepage with our new purple logo. We are also extending the logo to every page on our network, all of our company communications and all of our partnerships. Standardizing around the purple logo will create a consistent experience for Yahoo! users, advertisers and employees, and it will strengthen our brand going into the next decade. Go purple!

Glenn Tokunaga
Art Director and Senior Brand Specialist

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10 Comments Add your own

Every Yahoo User | October 7th, 2009 at 11:59 am

Glad to know Yahoo’s networks are perfect, without any bugs or user complaints or needed improvement, so that the logo can be fixed. LOLz. Get the network right should be priority 1, especially before this new advertising campaign.

aceone29 | October 7th, 2009 at 12:25 pm

If you are going to tell people who you are then tell them who you are, in this case colour great and its just Yahoo to do the rest.

Any branding of products have to start with an idea and this develops as with any contract into a completed brand, that people will recognise as your brand and nobody other organisation or corporate body.

So ” The Roving Giraffe ” says all power to your elbow Yahoo. G

fjpoblam | October 7th, 2009 at 12:31 pm

Great logo, but please bring back Wylie Gustafson’s voice for the bang click!

Anthony Birdwell | October 7th, 2009 at 12:51 pm

I think that this article is a great history lesson, altho there’s no search engine in the world that’s perfect Yahoo has always been reliable for me and I love what there doing with the sites. I’ve been using Yahoo since 2000 and I don’t plan on changing my homepage anytime soon.

=bg= | October 7th, 2009 at 4:05 pm

a home page suggestion; those ‘theme colors,’ the pale blue, orange, etc, are a bit stale- how about some patterns or Y! designs for the border? Much like (hate to say this, as I don’t use them) AOL’s page?

Seth Wisely | October 8th, 2009 at 4:56 pm

Did someone forget to include the original bytes from akebono?

valves manufacturer | October 9th, 2009 at 5:45 pm

Yahoo,this logo is very good,I like this logo.

Anton | October 12th, 2009 at 12:02 pm

Gustafson’s voice for the bang click

takien | October 26th, 2009 at 11:34 pm

Yahoo! is the one of famous logo…
nice.. i like it

Ryan | November 5th, 2009 at 2:18 pm

I prefer the red logo because it’s more appealing. Purple is stereotypically a girl’s color. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I think red was a better color. Changing it to purple just adds more bad things to the already crappy homepage.