[grey-area]

I'm curious - have you tried this in real life? The mediocrity of consensus has doomed any such attempt I've seen in a real company.

If so, could you share the details as it sounds interesting, if unorthodox and counterintuitive.

If not, what makes you so confident it would work?

[Terretta]

Yes, I've tried it and I've had useful or surprising input come from unexpected quarters. Not always, but enough to make asking routine. Sometimes we'll even get a new team member, someone who'd been thinking about this longer but their group didn't need it, for example.

Sorry if I sounded as though I was advocating consensus about a systems architecture across the whole company. I am not. I'm talking about gathering data, and that's the expectation that should be set.

Collecting input informs the decision making role, but that role shouldn't be abdicated.

[grey-area]

Thanks for the clarification, I agree gathering data from everyone is useful, as long as decisions are then taken by someone competent in the field (be it branding or systems architecture).

I'm not sure about this new Yahoo logo - there are some nice points (the bigger O at the end to imply an exclamation, the simplicity), but the tilted !, kerning and new font are pretty awful and it does look like the CEO had a hand in designing it on a weekend. I just visited the yahoo home page to see it - the exclamation animating in for no reason is particularly grating, and the positioning of the logo is also amateur (it should hang on the left over the nav below for balance), so I can't really see the process employed as Yahoo as anything but a failure here.

It's a shame this article focussed so much on the process rather than the end result, but I think he just assumed the end result was clearly, objectively bad.