Yahoo’s New Logo — And Branding Changes

Almost invariably, I hate branding changes. Sometimes, they’re needed because of changes of business, but most are just sheer WTFery and large wastes of money.

But first, I’d like to incorporate this geeking out about Yahoo’s new logo by reference. There’s one quibble I have, though: I wouldn’t use the word “fashion” to describe Optima. I’d say “formal.” There’s a seriousness to it, but it’s also neither a fish-or-fowl entry in the serif vs. sans dichotomy.

It’s one of my favorite typefaces, and that’s one of the reasons I use it for the body text on deirdre.net. I use a funky serif font (Opuscula Serif) for the headlines, so the body text needed to be something that wasn’t quite the usual Helvetica or Times, but also needed not to be particularly far out there.

The old Yahoo logo wasn’t dated. It was friendly. The new one is just off-putting. Ugh. I feel sad for some talented designers, like Marco, who have to face that every day.

Here’s a branding change I think makes sense, even though I don’t like the logo change:

United Airlines had a classic logo designed by Saul Bass in 1974. It’s invariably referred to as “the tulip” logo.

I’ll skip a branding change here and go to the last pre-merger change to the monochrome tulip logo, which is my personal favorite.

Then there was the merger with Continental, which had the “lottery cage” logo (a change from their earlier “meatball” logo, which you can see on their wiki page).

So the goal was to really bring home that this was a merger. So the type saying “United” looks more similar to the historic look for United, but the tail logo was from the Continental side of the house. And there was much whining, but I actually think it’s brilliant integration of the history of both companies. They were keeping the United name, but they kept the significant part of the Continental logo: the tail of the plane.

This is the rare case where a logo change made unambiguous sense (more so than the similar change American made to their long-standing logo).

But Yahoo’s? Makes no sense to me. Being different isn’t being better. There are far more ways to fail than there are to succeed.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

Finland and Spokane: More Commentary

First, Lisa Hertel corrected me on my previous calculations: Finland’s hotel price was €80 ($106), not $80, but it also included breakfast and taxes. Thanks for the catch.

Rick Kovalcik additionally pointed out that Finland’s hotel rate also included wifi and taxes. Thanks!

I’m not going to do the re-calculations, but you get the point: it tips things more in Finland’s favor despite my gaffe.

Then, the other night, a friend of mine and I were doing travel window shopping on Facebook chat, and he booked a one-way ticket from Oakland to Oslo for under $300 on Norwegian Air Shuttle.

I’d missed the news, later posted to my blog entry, but Tommi added a comment to my post: Norwegian Air Shuttle (a low-cost carrier) has just announced US routes. Their five US cities are: Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, New York City (JFK), Oakland, and Orlando.

More on that in a minute.

Next year’s Finncon, the Finnish national convention, is going to be in Jyväskylä, the 7th largest city in Finland. It only has air service from Helsinki on Flybe, but people generally get there by train or road.

Airfare from Oakland to Helsinki one-way is $576.40, but that includes (remember, low cost carrier) no bag, no meal, and no assigned seat. That’s $94 extra.

One plus was that there’s zero penalty for flying only one way (verified by checking other cities).

I don’t know why it wouldn’t show return flights (suspect their site can’t handle long connects), but I didn’t dig too deeply into it. Flying to/from Sweden (ARN) was $1265 on Norwegian with basic extras. Flying to/from Helsinki same dates (July 8-18) on SAS and partners was a hair under $1500. It was $1510 looking on United, but all segments were actually on Lufthansa. I don’t generally book LH for long haul as I like my economy plus thank you very much. For long haul, it may literally be a lifesaver.

Also, I’ll note that there’s a lesson in this: when searching for the least expensive of non-specific dates, as I was in my last post, is a very different problem space than searching for specific dates. If you don’t need to be anywhere at any time in particular, you can always pick the best fares.

About Those East Coast Fares

For JFK-GEG (Spokane), the lowest fares next July-Aug are $590 rt on Alaskan, basically 10% more than the fares I found out of SFO. 10-20% higher than that was not unusual, though. In general, Spokane’s numbers vary a lot, which indicates that they are frequently hitting capacity even this far out.

Cheapest flights to HELsinki are $914 on Turkish, meaning a change of planes in Istanbul, or about 15% less than the fares I found from San Francisco.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.