[potatolicious]

> "A logo is really a visual manifestation of all the complex ideas, values and people that fuel a company"

You lost me here.

A logo is a marketing tool. What part of the yellow and red double arches says "hamburgers"? What part of a weird green mermaid-thing says "coffee"? What part of staggered striped blue lines say... actually nevermind, that one actually does say "IBM", literally.

A logo is more frequently abstract than it is descriptive, and the more iconic you go the less they have to do with the company's business or even its people. How does an apple with a chunk taken out of it represent high-end consumer electronics?

How do concentric red circles describe "bargain department store"? How does a strange six-pointed star describe "Wal-Mart", or any of its values, products, businesses, or people? Exactly what does the iconic cursive Coca-Cola script represent? Is the flowing script supposed to represent refreshment and thirst-quenching?

A logo's primary purpose is to be immediately recognizable and indelibly associated with a brand. That brand may evoke lifestyles, ideas, values, and people - but I assure you the logo has next to no role in that. Shrewd, persistent, on-message marketing does that. In some circles Wal-Mart's brand has become associated with gross corporate abuse, representing all that is wrong with greed and capitalism - I don't believe Wal-Mart's logo had anything to do with this branding (or rather, mis-branding).

This is a tempest in a teapot. Disregarding the fact that Yahoo openly acknowledged this as more of a plaything than a serious attempt at rebranding, the logo really doesn't have that much to do with the sort of brand Yahoo wants to build for itself, or the values and ideas they seek to represent.

[bigiain]

"What part of the yellow and red double arches says "hamburgers"? What part of a weird green mermaid-thing says "coffee"? What part of staggered striped blue lines say... actually nevermind, that one actually does say "IBM", literally."

There is, though, a reason why the IBM logo is blue and blocky, not yellow and arch-y - same as there's a reason the mermaid-thing isn't a geometric-thing and is green-on-brown not red-on-yellow.

There's a language that images and colors speak - not in specific terms like "hamburger", "coffee", or "computer" - but in impressions and feelings like "dependable" or "fun" or "earthy". I don't know enough about that language to speak it fluently, but I do usually "get the gist of what they're saying" in a well designed logo(/logo-type/website/landing-page/ … ), and I've worked with great designers who can explain exactly what the message they're sending with their design is - and follow along and agree with their choices. I suspect your "next to no role" in evoking feelings and emotions is significantly undervaluing the power of good graphic designers. It's by no means a replacement for "shrewd, persistent, on-message marketing", it's certainly something that can both help and hinder those efforts.

If you let the public "choose" your logo, you're choosing to accept your logo will send whatever message _they_ want it to send. That's quite likely not going to be the best fit with your business plan or the roadmap for your company and products moving into the future.

[potatolicious]

I agree design language matters - don't take me as anti-designer. I believe that this article severely and massively overstates it, though. Effective design hints at the intended message (sometimes, though as you get more iconic this design message becomes more and more abstract), it does not build the brand.

Take Whole Foods as an example - the typography, colors, and accents on the logo all refer to a desired corporate identity, but it would IMO be severely overstating the case to say that this is the embodiment of the company's brand, as the article seems to be claiming for Yahoo. The logo is but one tiny part of a huge puzzle, the vast majority of which lies firmly in the realm of marketing and branding.

Honestly, IMO Yahoo could change their logo to nearly any of the crazy options that they played with, and their brand would not be measurably worse off (or better off). Once you move away from "Bob's Burger Palace" with a giant neon burger for a logo, you're getting into territory where the perceptual impact of your logo becomes more and more esoteric, hard to measure, and subtle. I sincerely doubt anyone looks at the Yahoo logo and goes "those disjoint serif letter sure sound like a fun and dynamic website!"

There are good logos and bad logos, IMO the notion that logo design and measurably influence brand perception (especially when you get into extremely abstract logos like Yahoo, Apple, or even Google) is true, but severely overstated by some designers. It would seem to me that a successful logo is less about messaging and more about its longevity and ability to be iconic.

If you took some text and wrote it IBM-style, it would still be visibly IBM. If you took the red-yellow combination and put it on something without the arches, it would still be visibly McDonald's. The mermaid figure that represents Starbucks is so out there, and the green so consistently applied to all of its branding, that it can stand alone without the name of the company and still be instantly recognizable. Those factors are IMO far, far more important to a logo than the extremely abstract ideas and values they represent.