AOL Reveals Lame New Look & Logo

They should rename the company to MediaGlow (the division that owns all their blogs).

http://www.mediaglow.com/

The AOL name is tarnished with both investors (from the disastrous merger with Time Warner) and consumers (nightmare cancellation tactics) alike.

My god. There are so many basic logo design principles that they just throw out the window with this. for instance:

- A logo should be unique and identifiable. This (or rather these) are neither.

- It should work in black and white, and on a small scale (business cards, etc.) I don't see these doing living up to that.

Besides, they're simply plain old ugly...

If they’re trying to leave the ’90s behind, they should have communicated that to the logo designers.

AOL's branding problems (viz. the "Platform A" mess; you _do_ remember Platform A, right?) are emblematic of the larger problems they face as a company. They sit atop a great pile of technologies on the advertising side, and a great set of sites on the media side, but imagine trying to get anything innovative done at a place that is steered like this by its marketeers. The good programmers leave because of the inertia, the good marketers leave because of the branding they have to work with, etc...

That's got to be the laziest design work I've ever seen.

This is AOL. Lameness is hardly anything new for them.

So AOL's entire future is built around their Weblogs Inc. properties?

Didn't they buy those for just $12 million or so?

I don't know if it's sad or awesome that a company of AOL's size and profile has decided to focus in on something that was once just a small pick-up.

From ISP to blog network....

I came to the comments because I thought the author forgot to actually include the new logo in his or her writeup. I thought that was just him or her making fun of the new logo.

I wonder if this is really the handiwork of Wolff Olins or if this was just the end result of design by committee gone horribly bad...