Yahoo's new logo. What a joke! It looks just about as bad as any logo I've tried to make.

My view on logos has always been that a good logo is:

80% Corporate success - If Google had used the exact same design for their logo in 1997 it would now be viewed as a work of classic marketing genius.

15% Longevity - Builds to a degree on the 80% since it is hard to have longevity without success but regardless of how "bad" a logo is, if you have it for 40 years people will think it is perfect representation of your company.

5% Design - This is the part that people get paid for, so they try to make it sound much more important than it is to the success of a logo.

Yahoo's new logo is totally meh. But I did like the little animation they did with the exclamation point swooping through the O.
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On a totally different note, I thought this CAPTCHA-like typeface was interesting.

Could they have done better? I'm curious because I can't remember a single example (seriously, examples would be most welcome) of a well-known established company introducing a new logo to wide acclaim. The best I ever seem to see is "Yeah, ok."

FedEx is one I can think of where improvement was strong and clear and while at this point we probably can't imagine going back to 1993 and the old logo, I don't recall it getting much talk in those nascent Internet days.

(And I'm definitely not saying a logo can be improved from a pure aesthetic point of view, just that I don't think aesthetics have much to do with the success of a logo.)

I agree. Yahoo is my home page, and I noticed it right off. I think the old logo had a lot more character, and the new one is pretty plain and boring.

I think when it's done well, people don't stand up and cheer, they think it's a natural extension of the brand, and don't really notice it in a major way.

There are some good ones here. UPS, Starbucks, Sprint, Google, BP, all good.

Never mind. I feel like I'm being bitchy and argumentative lately. So I'll just delete that and move on with life.

We wouldn't have you any other way, Alex.

VAM for self-awareness and editing and moving on and another VAM for being wonderfully argumentative. Because sometimes I just crave confrontation on subjective concepts.

Does it really count as two Visible Mojos when I put them in one post?