Yahoo Logo in 1994
It is surprise that Yahoo doesn’t have a logo in 1994 when started.
Yahoo logo in 1995 :The Jumping ‘Y’ guy
Yahoo Logo in 1995 :Going red on the Web
Yahoo Logo in 1996 :New Year Logo
1996:Purple on the Inside
Yahoo logo in 1997-2004: Y-bang
Present
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The full text from the Yahoo blog:
Don’t adjust your monitor. There’s something different about Yahoo!. Everything seems so… purple. That’s because over the past few months we’ve been quietly changing the color scheme of our logos as part of a widespread campaign that we expect to complete by mid-2010. Say goodbye to the red logos that have adorned our sites for most of our existence and say hello to purple as Yahoo! enters a new chapter in its history.
For Yahoo! employees, this isn’t new. We’ve been bleeding purple since 1996 when we anointed it as our corporate color. Why purple? Lore has it that our notoriously frugal co-founder, David Filo, got a great deal on lavender paint for our decrepit offices. But ultimately, purple evokes everything that makes working here so unique. Now we want to share that energy with you. As we give our sites a new purple glow, it seems appropriate to reflect on how far our brand has come since our beginnings in 1994. Here’s a retrospective of the Yahoo! logo and its evolution over the past 15 years.
After Yahoo! went from a hobby to a start-up, we needed something to adorn our office door and company t-shirts. The jumping “Y” guy was born.Designed by David Shen, our 17th employee and the lone design guy in the office, the logo shows a person jumping for joy after finding what he needs on Yahoo!. The blue circle over which the “Y” guy is leaping represents the world. Today, the “Y” guy no longer graces our hallways and conference rooms, but if you’re lucky you might see him on a business card from an old-timer. Later that year, Shen partnered with ad agency Organic Online to design the logotype. Yahoo! needed a horizontal logo because it took up less space than the more vertical jumping “Y” guy. Shen and Organic made sure the letters rose towards the right “so that, upon reading the word, you would get a sense of rising energy with the exclamation point punctuating that energy at the end,” according to Shen. They eventually settled on Able font, which they modified and made purple.
After much tweaking and refining, we launched the red Yahoo! logo across all of our sites on January 1, 1996.
Yahoo!’s abbreviated logo, affectionately known as the “Y-Bang” (“bang” is typesetter’s slang for exclamation point), was originally developed in 1997 for a button on the Yahoo! Toolbar that links to the front page (the full Yahoo! emblem was too wide to fit). In 2004 we partnered with ad agency Ogilvy to redesign the Y-Bang and created a version with a white “Y” inside a purple oval and a purple exclamation point next to it. The purple Y-Bang is now the official abbreviated logo that you will see throughout our sites.
Yahoo! is launching a new homepage with our new purple logo. We are also extending the logo to every page on our network, all of our company communications and all of our partnerships. Standardizing around the purple logo will create a consistent experience for Yahoo! users, advertisers and employees, and it will strengthen our brand going into the next decade. Go purple!
Glenn Tokunaga
Art Director and Senior Brand Specialist
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PS: I allowed myself to copy the full text because I don’t know how long this interesting information will be online ( at this point the images are NOT loading in the original page ..)
PPS: you can see the logos in the context of the pages here:
Bonus movie
yahoo home page screens 1996-2010
