"We're excited to share the new Yahoo! logo with you. It will begin appearing across Yahoo! properties globally tonight," said Kathy Savitt, Yahoo!'s Chief Marketing Officer in a blog post that was published shortly before 12:00am ET.
The new logo, which showed up in September 4, 2013 on Yahoo!'s homepage features parts of the old logo, including color and that iconic exclamation mark. It marks Yahoo!'s first major overhaul of its logo since 1995, and is part of a makeover that Yahoo Inc. has been undergoing since the Sunnyvale, California, company hired Marissa Mayer to become Yahoo!'s CEO.
"We wanted a logo that stayed true to our roots (whimsical, purple, with an exclamation point) yet embraced the evolution of our products," said Savitt. The most notable difference between old and new is the latter's font, which is more streamlined and sans serif.
Mayer has already redesigned 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.
"We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo - whimsical, yet sophisticated," Mayer wrote on her Tumblr account. She highlighted the redesigned looks as "modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud."
Mayer said that she spent most of the weekends in this past few months figuring out what the new logo should look like with four other Yahoo! colleagues: Bob Stohrer, Marc DeBartolomeis, Russ Khaydarov, and an intern, Max Ma.
In an effort to drum up more interest in the changeover, Yahoo! spent the past 30 days showing some of the proposed logos that Mayer and her helpers cast aside.
The revision is the first time that Yahoo! has made a significant change to its logo since a few tweaks shortly after its co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporated Yahoo! in 1995.
Since Yahoo’s logo is so recognizable, it's a good thing they kept the changes relatively sedate, says branding expert Laura Ries, of the Atlanta firm Ries & Ries.
"One of the worst things in the world you can do is have a logo around for two decades and then do something totally different. It's quite unsettling for consumers," she said. Keeping the purple and the exclamation point was a good idea, she said.
Mayer's overhaul of Yahoo! has attracted a lot of attention, but so far it hasn't provided a significant lift to the company's revenue. Yahoo! depends on internet advertising to make most of its revenue, an area where the company’s growth has been anemic while more marketing dollars flow to rivals such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.
A new logo is an important part of updating Yahoo!, Ries said, but at the end of the day the company has to do a better job of "verbalizing what exactly Yahoo is."
Yahoo!'s new logo has plenty of detractors, but Mayer is standing behind it. "I like the way the logo turned out, and I like the way that we did it," said Mayer. She didn't discuss specifics of the new design, which is based on the Optima font and has drawn protests from typographers. "We need to be really entrepreneurial," said Mayer. "Our attitude is to be really scrappy. We kept it in-house, we didn't spend millions of dollars doing it. We did it in a way that came from a very authentic place."
Mayer announced on stage that Yahoo! now has 800 million monthly active users, including 350 million monthly users on the Yahoo!'s mobile apps. The number does not include traffic to Tumblr.
Yahoo!'s stock has climbed up to nearly 80 percent, but most of that its gain has been driven by the company's 24 percent stake in China’s Alibaba Holdings Group because it has emerged as "one of the fastest growing companies on the internet," said investors.
Mayer has completed her first year in Yahoo! where she's in the trying to revitalize a company that has hundreds of millions of users but declining revenues. The company has recently seen a surge in traffic to its sites, and released well received mobile apps, but has yet to translate those efforts into higher earnings. Mayer said she is focused on turning the company around. "My ultimate goal is to get the company growing again," she said.