Like writing, typography is an art everyone imagines that they are competent to judge. From Dorothy Sayers imagining her opinion was better than Jan Tschichold’s to Mark Shuttleworth altering his company’s direction so that he could play with design, otherwise intelligent people are constantly falling into the fallacy that they can judge typography despite having no experience with it. The latest high-profile example of this fallacy is Marissa Mayer’s comments on the new Yahoo! logo, the majority of which reveals her lack of design expertise.
I knew the process is doomed to mediocrity as soon as I read her first criteria: “We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in the human form . . . so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.” Aside from how arbitrary the limitation is, what strikes me is the immediate escape into metaphorical explanation. Such explanations are rarely a sign of someone with any expertise; in my experience, they are the sign of someone who does not know what to observe. A trained designer is more likely to reflect that giving all the otherwise straight lines in the logo a slight curve is mostly wasted space for the simple reason that most people are going to look at the logo carelessly, and see straight lines regardless, simply because that is what they expect to see.
Mayer’s next criteria is: “We preferred letters that had thicker and thinner strokes – conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do.” Not only is there more meaningless metaphor, but the logo will be largely seen online, and even a beginning designer knows that online legibility generally requires fonts with consistent strokes.
Further down the list of criteria, Mayer adds a “mathematical consistency.” Although this requirement sounds impressive, it becomes meaningless when you consider that all typefaces are designed to have a mathematical consistency. She might as well have said that she wanted the logo to have a breadth and depth.
Mayer goes on to explain that “we felt the logo was most readable when it was all uppercase, especially on small screens.” However, against what Yahoo! employees “felt” are centuries of practice and study that shows that lower case letters are more legible because they have a more irregular shape that a solid block of upper case letters of the same size – especially at smaller sizes.
In the end, only two of Mayer’s seven criteria are reasonable starting points: wanting to keep a hint of the old design (although having something serif-like as that hint is somewhat odd), and wanting to do something “playful” with the final “oo.”
Judging from the final result, it was already clear that the logo’s designers were less than expert. However, Meyer’s blog does have the advantage of confirming the visual evidence. Predictably, her confused and poorly advised priorities are reflected in the result, and Yahoo! has labored to replace an outdated logo with a poorly conceived one.
Off the Wall 