SAN FRANCISCO: Yahoo has refreshed its logo for the first time since shortly after the Internet company’s founding 18 years ago.
The new look is part of a makeover that Yahoo Inc. has been undergoing since the Sunnyvale, Calif., company hired Google executive Marissa Mayer to become CEO 14 months ago.
Mayer has already spruced up Yahoo’s front page, email and Flickr photo-sharing service, as well as engineered a series of acquisitions aimed at attracting more traffic on mobile devices. The shopping spree has been highlighted by Yahoo’s $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, an Internet blogging service where the company rolled out its new logo.
The redesigned logo retains some old elements. Yahoo’s familiar exclamation point, meant to punctuate a yodeling sound that has long been the company’s calling card, is still there, too, but with a twist. When visitors come to Yahoo’s front page or an app, the exclamation point dances across some of the lettering before settling at the end of the company’s name at a slight tilt of nine degrees.
“We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo — whimsical, yet sophisticated,” Mayer wrote on her Tumblr account.