Yahoo! News is the news vertical of Yahoo, the web portal and search engine. Its visual identity is not a standalone mark but a lockup of the parent Yahoo wordmark with the word “News,” meaning the Yahoo! News logo has followed every iteration of the corporate Yahoo identity since the service launched in August 1996 as an internet-based news aggregator.[1]
Design and History
Yahoo! News has never had a separate logo design history of its own. Instead, it uses the Yahoo brand wordmark, which has been redesigned only twice in the company’s history. The first significant change came in 2013, and the second, and most recent, came in September 2019.[2]
The 2019 refresh was created by the design consultancy Pentagram in a project led by New York-based partner Michael Bierut, with team members Britt Cobb and Abby Matousek.[3][4] It was the first significant change to the brand since the previous logo was introduced in 2013.[3] According to Pentagram, the new identity was designed to be simpler and more flexible than its predecessor, and it looked back to the original, quirky 1996 logo.[3]
The 2019 redesign also introduced a simple “y!” monogram, which Pentagram said would be used as the foundation for a cohesive brand architecture that locks up the “y!” with various channels to create sub-brands for properties such as Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Weather.[3] The Yahoo! News wordmark follows this same system, pairing the parent wordmark with the channel name.
Meaning and Symbolism
Pentagram documented specific meaning behind the 2019 Yahoo identity. The refresh reflected a new brand strategy positioning Yahoo as an “amplification brand,” amplifying the things that matter. Pentagram stated that this idea was visualized in Yahoo’s exclamation point, a punctuation mark that literally stands for amplification.[3]
The “y” and “!” of the logo are both set at an angle of 22.5 degrees, a forward tilt that Pentagram said suggests a sense of momentum and excitement. The angle, precisely 1/16th of a circle, became the basis for a visual language built around angles and incremental slices.[3] Pentagram also noted that the repeating circles of the “a,” the “o”s, and the dot on the exclamation point echo the audio mnemonic of the yodel, capturing the voice of a brand named after an exclamation of joy and discovery.[3]
Typography and Design
The 2019 Yahoo wordmark is set in Centra No. 2 Extrabold, with the letters of the logotype modified to be more geometric and compact.[3] The exclamation mark was italicized for emphasis, as it has been in every iteration of the logo since the company’s founding.[3]
The identity appears in purple, Yahoo’s signature color since 2003. Internally, the 2019 rebranding was called “Project Purple.” The Pentagram designers refined the palette, selecting a primary purple they called “grape jelly” and secondary purples nicknamed “hulk pants” and “malbec,” along with accent colors.[3] The logo was optimized to work across various platforms and scales, from the small canvas of a mobile app to the side of a building.[3]
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