Marissa Mayer Ain’t No Designer (exclamation point)

Let her new logo be a lesson to all CEOs...

“I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous.” Marissa Mayer.

Ah…no Marissa. No. You don’t.

Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, released their new logo yesterday, casually telling the world (via her acquisition Tumblr) that she knocked it out over “one weekend” with designers.

Yeah. It looks like it.

It looks like the kind of design that was dictated by a CEO who thinks, because of their “love” of “brands, logos, color, design, and, most of all, Adobe Illustrator”, that they are, via some kind of magical design-love-osmosis, as creative and skilled as a designer trained to actually ah….design stuff.

As a person who heads a company that builds start-ups, I can tell you how much I think I know about design. How extensively I’ll research every other logo and user interface. How painstakingly I’ll pore over hundreds of font options and colours and layouts. And how, with finality (control freak that I am) I’ll hand my reams of web page ‘mock-ups’ (made in Word) to my designer saying “like this.”

Then we’ll nut it out and I’ll ‘collaborate’ with the designer, (i.e. picking apart their suggestions and imposing my own). But, in the end I have to listen to them, because I’m not a designer.

We can’t all be Steve Jobs. We can’t all be masters of product and marketing AND design. I’d like to think I am, but as soon as I sit down with a designer, I know that I don’t know everything; left of field ideas I would never have envisioned, fonts I’ve never seen, radical layouts and colour combinations I never dreamed feasible, and an in-depth understanding of programming restrictions that my tiny non-programmer brain could not possibly fathom.

There aren’t enough adjectives to describe the utter shittyness of the new Yahoo logo. But, it is a warning to all company CEOs:

There are certain pies you should think twice before sticking your fingers in. Design is one of them.

Afterthought: If, however, this abomination of a logo was her attempt to get people talking about Yahoo, it certainly is a masterstroke of marketing.

READ THE FOLLOW-UP TO THIS POST: Marissa Mayer Ain’t No Designer (part 2!)

Marissa Mayer quotes taken from: http://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/60336044815/geeking-out-on-the-logo