| But, apparently, sees graphic design as something she is equally qualified to participate in without domain knowledge.| This is one of the hardest thing about doing design - the fundamental lack of understanding of what it takes. I could go on forever, but there are a subset of clients who resent paying me because "my nephew...this guy at work....my husband" could do it for free. They designed a flyer in word where every sentence was a different font, color, bold, italics and had no focal point or sense of white space. They added drop shadows and glows to everything because the more the better. They respect me as a video editor because they are incapable of using the program. They respect that it takes a certain amount of skill to get timing and pacing and flow and all the tech stuff like codecs and exporting that all sounds like gibberish. They just know that there are a lot of settings when they click export so they let me do it because that makes it "hard". But design. Fucking Word Art and "save as jpg" make them believe that's all it takes. Everything goes on behind the scenes with design. DPI, cmyk, rgb, bleeds, layout, emphasis, proportion, they never see that. Us designers enable them too. We export to jpg for the client and work directly with the print company to give them a full res, properly formatted final piece to print. Fuck Marissa Mayer. I had respect for her and what she was trying to accomplish with Yahoo. I didn't know if she could pull it off. But I had tremendous respect for her efforts and the steps she has taken thus far. But now, just fuck you.
I'm just going to quote the top comment from the articel, as it explains my sentiments completely: I don't think this article is particularly well-written. It doesn't offer me any insights about the logo at all, it just tells me it's bad without explaining why. In fact, as a layman, the logo looks just fine. The only thing I would change is the color of the dark-on white logo, the purple is a bit too vibrant and is a bit jarring to look at on my screen. Other than that, I don't understand what makes it a work of the Devil as the author seems to think it is.After reading this article, albeit quickly, I still don't know what's wrong with Yahoo!'s new logo, or what they did wrong in designing it, or how it could be better. So I don't find the article persuasive.
I agree that the author doesn't provide a very specific critique of the actual logo. For me, it looks unbalanced. The spacing between letters (kerning) looks odd, and the 3-dimensionality fails on such a thin font. Those qualities make it look amateurish to me. I'm not a designer, so I guess I'm less sensitive to the debate about the process.
Maybe I'm just less perceptive of these types of things (I do tend to be more of an engineering type...), but as an average consumer, I don't think I'm more likely to visit Google or msn.com over Yahoo because I think Yahoo's kerning is off a bit. (Now that you mention it, it is a little funny, the Os are a bit too close and the Y and the H are a bit too far from the A. The slight perspective effect made by the bigger Y and last O and the smaller inner HO makes it a bit odd as well.)