The internet was thrown into a tailspin by yesterday’s revelation that an angle of just 9˚ is all it takes to change Yahoo’s new logo from serious to whimsical.
Seriously. Here’s Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s description of the design process, with emphasis added:
Other elements fell quickly into place:
- We didn’t want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve.
- We preferred letters that had thicker and thinner strokes – conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do.
- Serifs were a big part of our old logo. It felt wrong to give them up altogether so we went for a sans serif font with “scallops” on the ends of the letters.
- Our existing logo felt like the iconic Yahoo yodel. We wanted to preserve that and do something playful with the OO’s.
- We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark.
- We toyed with lowercase and sentence case letters. But, in the end, we felt the logo was most readable when it was all uppercase, especially on small screens.
And, we were off. Here is the blueprint of what we did, calling out some of what was cool/mathematical:
Our last move was to tilt the exclamation point by 9 degrees, just to add a bit of whimsy.
We were astonished by her findings, but it’s true. Look, no whimsy:
Whimsy:
But here at the New Statesman, we take our exclamation mark science seriously. We had to push these studies further. What happens if you double the tilt? Do you double the whimsy? Here’s an exclamation mark tilted by 18˚:
Astonishingly, it seems to have the same amount of whimsy. Perhaps there is some peak level of whimsy, beyond which no amount of tilting can increase it?
We went deeper, and made a concerning discovery. If you tilt an exclamation mark too far, it becomes Spanish:
¡Shocking! It appears that one unit of whimsy is roughly equal to one-twentieth of Spain, or five centiSpains.
After much trial and error, we determined this distribution of whimsy and Spanishness throughout the range of exclamation mark rotation:
Studies continue.
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