Saving Private Yahoo! promises to be a stormy and perilous expedition. But new CEO Marissa Mayer could start by making a simple but effective design decision -- lopping off the exclamation mark at the end of the company's name.
Losing the ! might sound like cosmetic surgery. It's not. If Mayer does use her blue pencil to strike it off the corporate marquee, it could be her kindest cut of all. Remember that scene from The Social Network where the suave Sean Parker of Napster tosses young fogey Mark Zuckerberg a piece of advice: "Drop the 'The.' Just 'Facebook.' It's cleaner"? Thanks to that throwaway bone Zuckerberg ends up helming a corporate giant that sounds cool rather than snobby.
Few people could be more alert to the dissonance caused by that whiplash of punctuation than Mayer, who is reputed to have the sensitivity of a tuning fork when it comes to logo design. After all, she's the one who drove her colleagues at Google nuts by ordering up and sampling forty shades of blue before settling on the "correct" shade -- that perfect, addictive hue she thought would attract the highest number of eyeballs and clicks. Google's ridiculously attractive logo owes her a debt of gratitude.
Mayer's Google episode recalls that famous blue-sweater scene from The Devil Wears Prada, where Miranda Priestly, a stand-in for the formidable Anna Wintour of Vogue, gives her snarky assistant an icy lesson in the origins of the "lumpy blue sweater" she is wearing. It's not just blue, nor is it turquoise, nor lapis, but creulean, she tells her in that creepy, girlish Meryl Streep voice. Surely someone like Mayer, who is so anal about image and optical effect, should be cringing at the juvenile vibes radiated by her company's logo?
Tarting the logo up with the most abused squiggle
in the English language only elevates it to purple prose.On its own, Yahoo, in that squat, jagged font and berry-purple hue, hits a loud-enough note. It sounds goofy and iconoclastic and brings to mind over-educated garage geeks, shorts and surf boards in the same way that tech companies with smart, snappy names like Google, Apple and Twitter do, and that companies like HP, Microsoft and IBM, which reek of pin-stripes and dandruff and knotted ties, do not.
Tarting it up with the most abused squiggle in the English language only elevates it to purple prose. Or reduces it to the company of the chat-room troll whose range of expressions travels all the way from "Awesome!!!" to "Sucks!!!"
This lapse is particularly unfortunate because Yahoo, like the coffee chain Starbucks, has literary pedigree. (Starbuck is the name of the first mate in Herman Melville's Moby Dick; the mere thought of it being Starbucks! is enough to make your latte curdle.) It's well known that Yahoo! founders David Filo and Jerry Yang chose the name from Jonathan Swift's satirical masterpiece Gulliver's Travels, which has a species of boorish, foul-smelling humanoids called the Yahoos.
Naming their fledgling tech company Yahoo, to capture the rugged, frontier spirit of the internet, was a brainwave that should not have been ruined by further ornamentation. Swift, a prose stylist who had a natural aversion to the exclamation mark and used it very sparingly in his novel -- and then only to indicate irony -- would be the first to disapprove.
Worse, if you click on the exclamation mark, it yodels.
All of this makes Yahoo! ripe for send-up, which is exactly what the website TechCrunch did on April Fool's Day by replacing the ! with an :( to indicate the sinking giant's dire business prospects. And given that every one of Yahoo's myriad services carries its name, the exclamatory crime is repeated ad nauseum.
In fact, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Directory, and so on sound just like the Houyhnhnms - another of Swift's fictional creatures -- a noble species of talking horses who, having no word in their language to describe anything evil, use Yahoo as an epithet, saying: Hhnm Yahoo, Whnaholm Yahoo, Ynlhmndwihlma Yahoo to describe everything from the "folly of a servant" to an "ill-contrived house."
Yahoo! Inc. has tripped on punctuation before. Four years ago, when co-founder Jerry Yang sent out an email to his employees informing them that a good number were to be axed, he wrote the entire missive in lowercase.
This was not unusual for Yang, who wrote all his official correspondence in this informal style, but several Yahoosiers were offended. Lowercase showed a want of seriousness. If Yahoos must be downsized they should be downsized in uppercase.
And so should exclamation marks.
Illustration Sources:
TechCrunch50-2008/Flickr
Giorgio Montersino/Flickr
drewgstephens/Flickr
istolethetv/Flickr
