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Comment by anologwintermut | Hacker News Reader

Her experience and micromanagement apparently produced a logo that looks like it belongs on a web portal framed by IE6's forward thinking UI and appears to have been designed by someone who just figured out that illustrator could do 3d effects.

So, so much for making users think the company has moved beyond its stagnant products. Which in a lot of ways it has, look at the Yahoo weather app for Android, the design is modern and integrates one of Yahoo's rather under leveraged properties: flickr. That was nice design.

As to signals to the best of the best, this blog post confirms both that she will micro manager you and do design by committee simultaneously (a dubious distinction I don't think even Steve Balmer could achieve). And that's the signal if they like the logo.

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Micromanagement is a management style, not something you do over a weekend. Saying that the CEO micro manages because she's deeply involved with the evolution of her company's brand is a bit silly.

Someone said that Steve Jobs wasn't a micromanager, only a great manager obsessed with details. I guess he should have stayed in his kitchen making sandwiches for his four kids.

> Micromanagement is a management style, not something you do over a weekend.

Micromanagement is a bad management style to apply with creative teams. It breaks the creative flow, clouds judgement of quality and adds external pressure to a process that depends on consistent internal drive. You can micromanage accountants, SAP programmers and clerks, but if people like those in design teams or R&D are focused on quality, micromanaging them quickly begins to resemble herding cats.

> Someone said that Steve Jobs wasn't a micromanager, only a great manager obsessed with details.

Someone said that about Steve Jobs, and his work was of a very different nature. Articulating the concept of personal computing into a product is very much unlike the process of designing the logo, even if they are superficially similar.

PG commented about Jobs yesterday re: Google compose. Basically, he argues Steve Jobs is an anomaly in that he can micromanage design without breaking it.

If he wasn't already dead, seeing this logo and reading this post about the CEO and intern with their hands on an Illustrator file would probably give Steve Jobs a stroke.

I can just about hear his voice: "This is shit!"

Were you implying that my criticism of Mayer was akin to saying she should have stayed in the kitchen or were you suggesting we should cut her some slack because no doubt some asshole somewhere has said sexist shit like that?

For what it's worth Straw-man Steven Jobs --- the mascot of Apple and God design --- is said to have obsessed over details when telling people their designs were shit and needed to be redone. As far as I am aware, the Steve Jobs of legend didn't actually sit down and do design work himself.

Micro management is a style and I agree one weekend work session isn't enough to say she is a micro manager, but her blog post is certainly enough to say she micro managed the logo design and people will extrapolate (especially since she was criticism for micro-managment while at Google). Unless of course the story that the logo was designed primarily over a weekend isn't true and/or she wasn't as involved as she said she was. I don't think those are likely or better alternatives.

wow you seem bitter. I like the new logo. It is in line with the trend toward more 'flat' looking designs.

It isn't flat as it's semi-3D. But even so, that's not a reason to feel it's good - that's just a reason to feel it's current-ish.

It has 3d bevels, if you look closely. That makes it look a bit dated, although just being flat to be trendy wouldn't be good either.

Why it's sometimes hard to take critique from HN seriously: http://img.pandawhale.com/29687-Grumpy-Cat-I-hate-everything...

Memes disgust me

The fact that you have to look closely is a problem. The details only barely show up on their website on my 13inch macbook and I at least am left semi-straining to actually resolve the logo completely. It looks to me like someone designed a logo with little regard to how it would be primely seen by non employees --- I'm sure it looks better on a giant sign out front.

It's a straight up bad design. It's the logo of a massive company, there is no room for emotion or being "bitter". They have a lot of man power, and produced this, it's sub par. It's not pleasing to the eye, it's sharp and 3d-ish. You'd get something better by throwing $500 towards 99 designs.

A logo should look great on a massive banner as well as my tiny retina screen. Right now, when it's smaller, the bevels and shadows/jaggedness of the logo are very off putting, not something I'm pleased to look at.

OK maybe you're right. Can you show me an objectively better one?

About 5 of the "30 days of logos" ones.

> It's a straight up bad design.

No, design, and especially logo design, is extremely subjective. Don't pretend like it's not.

I disagree. I liked the new logo. :(

<sarcasm>Very good argument, I must say. All design decisions must be made on the basis of likes and dislikes.</sarcasm>

once you reach a certain point, design /is/ largely subjective.

"The bevel is bad" is not a very good argument, either. Why is the bevel bad? Explain it without making a reference to current flat trends.

Traditional (i.e. Paul Rand era) logo design was trying to distill a company down to a minimal essence. Having bevels leaves in a decorative element that makes in non-minimal. That it should look good in 1 color is fundamental to traditional logo design.

Yes, but it is going to be used on the screen 99% of the time, you say. But people who violate that rule end up with logos that are just a little bit tacky to a graphic designer.

When they print it, print it in purple. problem solved. i can barely notice the bevel, it is meant to be subtle. The OP sounds ridiculous.

>> "The bevel is bad" is not a very good argument, either.

While I don't like the logo at all, I have to agree with this.

Yahoo's logo isn't designed for logo and design aficionados, it's designed so that the masses can easily associate the shapes and colors of the logo with the company (which leaves me to wonder why they fixed something that isn't really broken). Most people don't think much about the logo beyond that.

The exercise of rebranding itself is just a PR stunt to tell the world that Yahoo's not the old Yahoo.

> which leaves me to wonder why they fixed something that isn't really broken

Commissioning a new logo is a common way new CEOs mark their territory.

It's rarely useful, but I suppose it beats having them running around peeing on all the desks.

We're talking about a logo design decision. Logo design is, in part, largely about likability.

Well said.

It should be noted that it was under this individual's reign at Google that the notorious 41 tints of blue occurred[1], which was clearly an indicator of abject ineptitude regarding art and design.

The comment about Illustrator was cringe worthy. The idea that someone is so filled with hubris regarding a field well outside their domain has the wafts of Denning - Krugerism pluming out.

[1] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

It's "Dunning–Kruger" (for the benefit of those that are not familiar with it and are trying to Google it).

The new Yahoo logo will be as monumental as the Google logo.

This is a great point. When we think of Google, we think of a lot of other things before the logo (at least I do).

The effort of moving the conversation further with this marketing is impressive.. How many more "30 days" type of marketing initiatives will this create?

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