AOL, Period

Image: Aol.

If y!ou thought Yahoo's $100 million ad campaign launched in September was distracting (what with its oddly placed exclamation point after the Y and its insistence that's it's "All About Y!ou"), wait till y!ou get a load of AOL's new logo, which renders the company's name as "Aol."—period included.

"Our new identity is uniquely dynamic," AOL chairman Tim Armstrong boasted blandly in a release quoted by All Things Digital's MediaMemo blogger Peter Kafka. "Uniquely dynamic"? Why not "Dynamically unique"?

Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins, the branding company that created the logo, which overlays the simple Aol. onto a revolving library of images like goldfish, hands, doodles, and other imagery, said in the same release, "AOL is a 21st century media company, with an ambitious vision for the future and new focus on creativity and expression. This required the new brand identity to be open and generous, to invite conversation and collaboration, and to feel credible, but also aspirational."

Steven Heller, former art director for the New York Times and co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department at New York's School of Visual Arts described the lettering as "almost generic" in an interview with Portfolio.com, but thought the use of images was intriguing: "It offers a tease—if you care enough to find out."

"They're so random, I think what they're trying to do is appeal to a young audience," he continued. "They're turning their attention to a youth market, which will be a growing market as their older market falls away."

"Will it make me go to AOL?" he asked. "No. That said, it's actually prettier than the Google logos. The Google logos tend to be horsey—they're kind of goofy, like greeting cards. This is more like a hip boutique."

Then there's that period at the end of the Aol., which might not be a very comforting punctuation mark for a company that just announced a staff reduction of 2,500. Design-wise, Heller suggests "the period holds [the 'Aol'] in and frames it," and that it hearkens back to the old New York Times logo, which also had period at the end until it was revamped in the 1960s. "It's kind of old fashioned," he said. "I find it obtrusive."

In an interview this weekend with paidContent's Staci D. Kramer, Armstrong pointed out that the period was more than design flourish: It suggests a new URL configuration that will reinforce the company's various content areas like Aol.Music or Aol.Mapquest, etc. "There’s always something behind AOL. That’s the thing that we’re hoping to get across with our AOL brand. The AOL brand is composed of many different things. The nomenclature of the dot is what comes after the dot."

The Web is just one medium for the new logo, Heller points out. "How does it sit in context on a page, on your email, on a letterhead? There are so many applications a logo has."

He says he's willing to give it "the benefit of the doubt."

Others are not so charitable. The Guardian's PDA blog rounded up some designers' opinions of the new logo, including Information Architects, Inc.'s Oliver Reichnestein who said, "If the goal of the redesign was to illustrate how the company is slowly vanishing from the fast-changing digital surface of the planet, I'd say: Job well done." Ouch.

If you think that fixating on corporation's branding changes is just the pastime of designers and that consumers don't actually care, keep in mind the story of PepsiCo's controversial redesign of the Tropicana logo earlier this year. After the company hired the Arnell Group to change its iconic orange with a straw logo, sales of Tropicana fell 22 percent and the old logo was restored. After that flap, Peter Arnell, head of the agency, was portrayed by some as a "a pompous, pretentious, phony intellectual," in the words of Newsweek's Daniel Lyons.

In 1996, AT&T Technologies re-branded itself Lucent Technologies and launched itself to the world with a rough-looking, hand-drawn red circle. The New York Observer's Ron Rosenbaum wrote that "it looked to me like some scary, sadistic grade-school teacher had scrawled a big red grade of zero on their ad." (He also quoted a friend calling it "an inflamed orifice" and another who waxed philosophical, saying its "hollow center symbolizes the emptiness and nothingness of technological culture.")

Ten years later, as Lucent went on to become part of Alcatel, a French telecom company, the logo has become its own sort of icon, prompting James Bowie of the AIGA, a professional association for designers, to praise it in a blog post headlined "The Lucent Logo Legacy: Long Live the Big Red Donut." It seems that even the worst logo can grow on an audience, calling to mind Noah Cross' cynical chestnut from Roman Polanski and Robert Towne's Chinatown: "Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

Then again, maybe we're looking too closely. Even though he's spent decades in the design world and written, edited, and co-written dozens of books on design, Heller cautions us not to over-think it.

"It's about play," he says. "If we take it too seriously, we'll go crazy."