Much Ado About Yahoo!

The holy grail of branding is to reach a place where consumers not only recognize and respect your brand, but fall in love with it, even identify with it – the difference between saying "I usually buy Budweiser beer" and saying "I'm a Bud man."

But this can create problems of its own. What happens when you want to update your brandmark, and it threatens to alienate your loyal clientele?

The latest company to find out is Yahoo!, which decided to change its familiar logo:

The new logo is a relatively modest departure: it features a different font, and a different shade of purple.

Yahoo! rolled out the winning redesign at the end of a thirty-day preview of other proposals that had been rejected. By the time you get through all of them (you can find them here) it's tough to tell some of them apart, let alone figure out why this one came out on top.