Yahoo: Kicking off 30 days of change | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo: Kicking off 30 days of change

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88 pointsdaegloe49 comments

Oh, I thought there were going be 30 days of actual change at Yahoo.

Exactly what I was thinking as well. Would have been cool to see one new change to Yahoo! over a 30 day period, oh well.

agreed - obviously everyone thinks some sort of a different "change" needs to occur

but that will totally prove that they have a direction and a purpose.

Yahoo's gone and slapped a hideous Yahoo nav bar across the top of Meyer's new fanfared Flickr design.

If she can't even keep her own flagship redesign fixed, she can't change their culture of asphyxiating products people actually loved.

I noticed this the other day. It's really ugly looking and a waste of horizontal pixels.

It's no more egregious than Google trying to show G+ down our throats. They've become the masters of persistent headers. Yahoo! is trying to the same.

I dislike that too.

You can configure adblock to block it. It does leave a weird gap between the flickr nav and your bookmarks bar, but that weird gap is better than the god awful yahoo nav. On any flickr page with the nav open adblock and select "block an ad on this page". Follow the steps and adjust the slider until the ad is gone. No more ugly ass bar.

Fortunately there was a browser plugin available almost immediately to remove it.

Excellent point. Have they not learned any lessons from Microsoft about how forced cross-pollination destroys products?

If my experience is any guide, I bet Yahoo is seeing users get to 'new' Flickr, pull their hair out for a minute trying to do whatever they came to do, and then leave.

Management is saying 'let's at least offer them a place to go when they leave'.

The designs are less important than the fact they can change every day for a month. I remember having to wait 6+ weeks to get some things changed.

The intl properties don't seem to be joining in on the fun, eg http://uk.yahoo.com/ http://mx.yahoo.com/

At a guess these 30 logos and the agreement to change them daily took much longer than 6+ weeks to prepare.

But that's marketing everywhere. And this a cute way to relaunch a brand. It creates a game rather than simply saying here is our new brand. I like it.

It is a cute branding exercise even if I hate the Day 1 logo. Maybe they get better over time, with the best one appearing on Day 30?

I have to say that I really like day one's new logo. I also really like what is happening at Yahoo at the moment. I'd like to see them balance out Google's dominance.

Mayer is known for her 41 shades of blue while at google: http://www.fastcompany.com/1403230/googles-marissa-mayer-ass...

I suspect this is her way of A/B testing logos at Yahoo.

This is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how you could gather enough metrics from using the logo for one day to evaluate its suitability. My guess is that the daily effect of the logo on the site's metrics would be low.

I suspect they've already chosen the new logo, but are showing off the "also-rans" first.

I believe Marissa used to lead the front page Doodle stuff at Google -- interesting to bring a similar branding concept over to Yahoo!

This is the right move. When I look at the Yahoo logo, all I see is the 90s, irrelevance and desolation. It will have more impact than a dozen more startup acquisitions.

Marissa mayer wants people who wouldn't otherwise visit yahoo webpages to come and see what they are upto. I think this one and the announcement that they would delete old unused yahoo email accounts, all fall into this category.

I like the idea. Apart from the excitement of actually changing the iconic logo, it will get Yahoo a lot of eyeballs in these 30 days and create some buzz around the site.

In addition to a cool marketing trick and testing opportunities, this is also a nice way for them to spot the copies of the old logo still used across their many websites and automate the update before the "official" roll out :)

Yahoo as a brand has become pretty corny to me over the years, and I associate their logo with this sentiment. Reading the article I thought maybe Yahoo is changing its logo so many times in quick succession to break the association of the Yahoo brand with whatever negative connotations it has with people. Kind of like forcing people to forget what they thought of Yahoo up until now by overwhelming them with change.

I'm not sure how well I explained this, but hey I just woke up!

I was reading this post the other day [1] from the Fake Steve Jobs blog about Lotus and IBM. Basically you could pretty much swap IBM or Lotus for Yahoo and the tone of the article would still make sense. Who is that excited about the logo of a company on its last legs?

[1] http://www.fakesteve.net/2008/01/oxymoron-of-week.html

Interesting approach. I wonder if having a new logo every day will dilute the impact of their "big reveal"? After all, by day 30, people are going to be used to different versions of the logo.

Also, 99% of people who visit yahoo.com probably won't know what's going on. There's a new logo on the main page, with absolutely no explanation anywhere.

If you click on the new logo, you actually get explanations and interesting video. http://www.yahoo.com/dailylogo

This is new; it didn't do it when I had originally posted.

Maybe their re-brand should include a change of name rather than just the logo. For me Yahoo! equates to damaged goods and bad history.

Day 1: Drop Yahoo mail and start over. Then maybe I'd come back to see what you have for day 2. Worst. Email. Evar. OK, wait, I just went to Yahoo mail and it wasn't the horrible pile of stink I remembered. So, someone got the memo and you really did start over. It looks strangely gmail-esque but kudos for ditching the old design.

Due to the latest gmail redesigns I've gone back to Y! mail full time and am having fairly good experience with it. It hasn't had major updates recently, but it does just seems to work.

I find the keyboard bindings I use more similar to outlook, which is what I have experience with unfortunately.

Change is good.

Until recent history, Yahoo would take forever to roll out new changes. The fact is they are trying new things and to the public, iterating faster. It is clear that Meyer has had some impact to Yahoo.

Whether users will like the new changes is another story but at least they have the ability to iterate out of the problem.

This appears to be a way to gauge public reactions to different logo iterations, without actually committing to one. Smart.

I wonder if this is the right way to rebrand. will it really make the new design stick in peoples' heads, or will it just make us all forget which is the new logo?

(not that I object to getting rid of the old one, time has not been kind to that font!)

The logo I'm seeing right now is, terrible. Gap Logogate comes to my mind right now...

So wait - in the spirit of innovation Yahoo! is going to rotate the logo on their homepage every day? Hmm, I can't think of any company (cough Google cough) that does that.

I have yet to run in to anyone who actually likes the new version of yahoo sports. It's pretty, but impossible to find a lot of basic info that was prevusly easy.

Looks like they forgot to update Yahoo Notepad.

http://notepad.yahoo.com/

Drop the exclamation point. It's cleaner.

Presumably it's because they want to keep the Y! abbreviation.

The exclamation point is iconic. What other brand gets away with an exclamation point in their name?

And is "yahoo!" ever written without the exclamation point except for using it sarcastically? It's nearly integral to the spelling.

Wham! [1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wham!

And two places, Westward Ho! [1] and St Louis-du-Ha! Ha! [2] [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Ho! [2] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Louis-du-Ha!_Ha!

Never thought I'd be recommending the excellent band "Godspeed You! Black Emperor" in such a context. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godspeed_You!_Black_Emperor

Or just shorten it to only the exclamation point.

Focus on logos.

That, right there, sums up everything you need to know about Yahoo! in one nice simple "WTF".

Yahoo: Kicking off 30 days of rejected logos

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