
AOL Reveals Lame New Look & Logo  - fogus
http://gigaom.com/2009/11/22/aol-reveals-lame-new-look-logo/
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biznerd
They should rename the company to MediaGlow (the division that owns all their
blogs).

<http://www.mediaglow.com/>

The AOL name is tarnished with both investors (from the disastrous merger with
Time Warner) and consumers (nightmare cancellation tactics) alike.

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mixmax
My god. There are so many basic logo design principles that they just throw
out the window with this. for instance:

\- A logo should be unique and identifiable. This (or rather these) are
neither.

\- It should work in black and white, and on a small scale (business cards,
etc.) I don't see these doing living up to that.

Besides, they're simply plain old ugly...

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stilist
If they’re trying to leave the ’90s behind, they should have communicated that
to the logo designers.

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jcdreads
AOL's branding problems (viz. the "Platform A" mess; you _do_ remember
Platform A, right?) are emblematic of the larger problems they face as a
company. They sit atop a great pile of technologies on the advertising side,
and a great set of sites on the media side, but imagine trying to get anything
innovative done at a place that is steered like this by its marketeers. The
good programmers leave because of the inertia, the good marketers leave
because of the branding they have to work with, etc...

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SlyShy
That's got to be the laziest design work I've ever seen.

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bitwize
This is AOL. Lameness is hardly anything new for them.

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jimboyoungblood
In fact, it's probably one of their core company values.

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brandnewlow
So AOL's entire future is built around their Weblogs Inc. properties?

Didn't they buy those for just $12 million or so?

I don't know if it's sad or awesome that a company of AOL's size and profile
has decided to focus in on something that was once just a small pick-up.

From ISP to blog network....

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potatolicious
They never had a chance, really - they did not, and could not ever own the
last-mile, which is the key to remaining viable as an ISP.

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pkulak
I came to the comments because I thought the author forgot to actually include
the new logo in his or her writeup. I thought that was just him or her making
fun of the new logo.

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xinsight
From the press release: "The new AOL brand identity is a simple, confident
logotype, revealed by ever-changing images. It’s one consistent logo with
countless ways to reveal."

So, it's a wordmark on top of clip art photos.

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eswat
I wonder if this is really the handiwork of Wolff Olins or if this was just
the end result of design by committee gone _horribly_ bad...

