Marissa Mayer is many things. A brand designer she is not.

After 30 days of change and countless dollars thrown at R&D, Yahoo! have unveiled their new logo. The past month showcased some options — most of which were bad — and unfortunately the end result is distinctly amateurish.

So what’s wrong?

Well to start with, in the context of a world waking up to the value of minimalism — if not flat design — Yahoo! have managed to date themselves overnight by embracing bevels reminiscent of stone carving; a skeuomorphic ornament best left in the 1990′s.

That carved stone look extends to the terminals, which are sharp and concave; except the ‘O’s which don’t have terminals, and the ‘!’ which does.

They’ve based the logo on Optima, which may be a great choice for a lawyer, but seems deeply inappropriate for a daring young brand with an exclamation mark in its name.

What’s more, the team at Yahoo! have tweaked the letter forms badly: compare the original contrast on the horizontal and vertical strokes with the newly symmetrical diagonals on the ‘Y’ and ‘A’; this is a large part of the reason the left half of the logo feels heavier than the right.

We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark.

You’d think that if you were going to apply kerning inconsistently you’d get it right somewhere, just by chance, but they haven’t. Take a look at the ‘YA’, ‘AH’, ‘HO’ and ‘OO’ as pairs. Mayer has suggested that there’ll be some small refinements made in future, and the first thing that needs to be done is fixing the tracking.

All in all it feels as if the logo has been derived from mathematical rules rather than set by eye, and both the promo video Yahoo! have released and one of Mayer’s stated aims seem to support that conclusion:

How did this happen?

The answer is depressingly familiar:

On a personal level, I love brands, logos, color, design, and, most of all, Adobe Illustrator. I think it’s one of the most incredible software packages ever made. I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous :) — Marissa Mayer

The in-house design team at Yahoo! must have been thrilled to discover an enthusiastic amateur was calling the shots.

This situation is in my opinion the worst kind of exploitation, in which designers are treated as little more than a mouse, or a walking-talking substitute for a CEO’s lack of design education. I have a lot of time for Marissa Mayer, but on this occasion it seems her ego was calling the shots.

How can we avoid this ourselves?

The first rule of branding, in fact the first rule of design, is that it’s not about making something the CEO likes; it’s about making something appropriate for the brand. No one is saying that branding is easy, especially with a brand valued at billions of dollars, but that’s all the more reason not to knock it out on the kitchen table over the course of a weekend.

The answer is to bring in a trained professional, from outside the organization who can take objective, informed decisions.

In other words, hire a designer.

What do you think of Yahoo!’s new logo? Have you rebranded recently? Let us know in the comments.

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If it can cleverly blend hardware and software in new ways, reach new markets, and take advantage of Nokia’s patent portfolio, Microsoft’s billions could be well spent.

Nokia might have gotten the better of Microsoft this week in selling its once-dominant handset business to Microsoft and entering into a broad patent agreement in a deal worth $7.1 billion. Microsoft’s stock price took a big hit. And no wonder: given the declining state of Nokia’s business, the deal seemed like a desperate attempt to prop up the largest manufacturer of phones that run Windows before it went under or switched to Google’s Android system.

In version control, best practice is to commit your work in discrete chunks. Unfortunately, sometimes that’s easier said than done when real life gets in the way. In this Treehouse Quick Tip, we’ll learn how to overcome this hurdle with Git’s stash command.

The post Git Stashing – Treehouse Quick Tip appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Going from Mad Men to Math Men. How technology has fundamentally changed the art and science of advertising.

Once upon a time the marriage of advertising to media was a simple party for two.  And even when the traditional media landscape expanded to online, marketers continued to work directly with publishers’ sales teams to buy advertising space. After all, the golden rule was “media as proxy for audience.”

If you’ve been using the UMBC campus wireless system lately (and our administrative software says that you have), you may have noticed a big improvement in speed and coverage. That’s because this summer, DoIT’s network engineers completed, in record time, a comprehensive system upgrade that brings UMBC up to current 802.11 standards.

That’s not to say that the campus wireless network has been ignored until now. Far from it. But the piecemeal ways in which previous expansions to the network were done, with an eye toward basic functionality that provided coverage to about 90% of building interiors, left UMBC with a hodgepodge of technologies, some almost 10 years old.

Discussions about a possible upgrade began in April. Soon after, the Office of Residential Life, eager to improve the wireless network in its buildings, agreed to fund upgrades to all of the residence halls. After the university put forward the funding for the academic buildings, the project was approved.

The massive amount of new network equipment required for the upgrade was ordered in May and arrived in June, when work commenced in the residence halls.

In Chesapeake Hall, for example, owing to the building’s solid cinder block construction, wireless signals were often interrupted. To combat this, during the building’s renovation, access points were installed in every other room, giving each group of four suitemates a point of their own.

Another immediate problem was in locating all of the 900 existing access points, many of which weren’t mapped. This was done with detection software, and a fair bit of eyeballing. Within two weeks, over 500 access points in the residence halls had been upgraded. Each access point would require approximately 30-45 minutes of work from two student employees to complete, with the project ultimately requiring over 1500 total hours of work.

Six student employees, along with network engineers Carlos McKinney and Ray Soellner, did the lion’s share of the work. The project also received an assist from DoIT’s telecom group with helped with some tricky wiring issues, and some of the more problematic locations.

Once the student staff had done the hands-on work, they assisted the network engineers to complete the configuration tasks, including making sure to accurately map the locations for each of the now 1200 access points.

In mid-July, work on the main campus began, which presented some unique challenges, such as the access point located in the rafters above center court in the RAC, and the one 20’ from the floor in Public Policy’s Lecture Hall 9.

Network Engineer Carlos McKinney remembers Lecture Hall 9 well.

"What we ended up having to do,” McKinney said, “is calling somebody from the electric shop to get an extension ladder to get to this one access point at the top of the lecture hall.”

McKinney said, “It did more swaying from side to side than I would expect an extension ladder to do, especially when you're trying to climb it. Ultimately we were able to get the access point replaced, but that was a bit of a trial, especially for me. I generally don't like heights anyway, and now I'm climbing up this extension ladder that's swaying, and it's not like I can grab onto something - it's a sheer wall.

“So, that was fun. But ultimately we got the access point replaced, it came up and everyone was happy."

In the Commons, where up to 1100 wireless devices might be in use at any given time, the number of access points was increased from 22 to 46, and these were placed closer to the places where traffic was heaviest.

Damian Doyle, DoIT’s Assistant Director of Networks and Security, commented on the changes there.

“Last semester in Commons, if you sat in Main Street in the middle of the day and tried to use wireless, you could barely check your email. You could maybe get a third of a megabit through, it was just so saturated with people,” Doyle said.

“I went over yesterday and did some informal measurements and I was getting fifteen or twenty megabits down to my phone,” said Doyle.

Work on the project was completed on August 21, with only days to spare before the fall semester was to begin. Similar projects at College Park and Towson took 6-12 months, while employing outside contractors, which greatly adds to the costs.

Now that the upgrade is completed, wireless users should notice a number of immediate benefits.

Doyle said, “[Before the upgrade] I could stream YouTube or run basic services; if I tried to do a bandwidth calculation I could maybe get 10 megabits. Now, I get sixty or seventy.

“Users will now see a lot less buffering. They’ll be able to multitask. If they are going to do higher end computing, if they’re really pulling a lot of data down, it’s probably an order of magnitude different, maybe five or ten times faster,” Doyle said.

With this massive improvement behind us, DoIT is already looking ahead to the next generation of wireless infrastructure, which is up to 10X faster than current standards. That means that a repeat performance of this summer’s magic will likely be required in the next three to five years.

Let’s just hope that the same great team of engineers and technicians is involved in that project.

June 8 was National Get Outdoors Day. Did you miss it? I did -- and chances are, you did, too. In 2012, out of the 313 million people in the United States, 70,000 participated. That's .0002 percent.

National Get Outdoors Day. Let's think about that.

Our nation's indoor-dwelling denizens, like you and me, have such a dearth of outside activity that a coalition of people and organizations banded together to get us to go outside. These folks tempted us with geocaching, bike clinics, fly-fishing lessons, hikes, canoeing, rock climbing and fairs in parks all over the country.

By many standards, these events were deemed a success. People went outdoors. Awareness was raised. People felt energized and happy. All good things.

But why aren't we outside anyway?

Read more!

Today is the day when it all started — the day when this little website launched back in 2006. Today, we celebrate our seventh anniversary, and you, dear readers, are the ones who have made it possible and kept us going.

Sorry about that heavy 0.5Mb GIF, but after all it’s our little birthday today and this GIF has been circling around the office for ages now.

Time For A Little Story

A couple of months ago, I was on a night train on my way to one of those countless Web design conferences. Being offline with a ridiculous roaming rate is always a good excuse to get some work done, and the music streaming from my good ol’ headphones helped me to focus on the draft of the chapter I was reviewing for our upcoming book.

At a late stop, a dark-haired guy in his 30s stepped into my coach, politely asking whether the seat next to me was taken, then carefully placing his bag right next to mine. From his bag, he pulled out his laptop, his Moleskine and a set of exquisite Japanese pens — ones you wouldn’t find in any regular stationery shop. He looked like an artist at first glance, but at the same time was running Coda on his laptop.

Once he had everything in place, he pulled out a few books from his bag — all of the usual suspects, I assumed: a couple of Five Simple Steps books, a few printouts with sketches and mind maps, some A Book Apart volumes. Then I kept my breath for a moment — I suddenly glimpsed our very own Mobile Book, still neatly and tightly packed and wrapped.

You see, I’ve never seen someone read our books before then. You know how it is: You create something, send it into the wilderness of the Web, only to be surprised when you discover that people out there actually use this thing whose trail wanders from tweet to tweet, from one designer to the next.

Best things always happen to you when you don’t expect them at all. A random conversation at any point of time can change and redefine everything. (Image credit: Duane Romanell)

I struck up a conversation with my neighbor, asking him his name and where he comes from, whether he is an artist and what he does for a living, what it’s like to be a freelancer, and what the industry is like in general. He replied eagerly, and so the conversation led from design to development to culture to UX to personal struggles and successes, as the train moved along in the dark night.

“So, how do you keep improving your skills?” I asked.

“You know, experimenting with stuff, playing around with what’s out there.”

“I guess going to conferences as well, then?”

“Yep, that too. And then there is this pretty cool magazine. It’s called Smashing.”

I smiled, resisting the urge to say something.

At some point, the conversation drifted off, and I returned to my editing duties, while my neighbor started drawing in his Moleskine, jumping from one Japanese pen to another as the light was dimming. Suddenly, he slowly leaned towards his bag, reached for the Mobile Book and started examining it. He unwrapped the book slowly and gently leafed through its pages. He kept turning the book from one side to another, helped only by the flagging light from the side of the coach. Not long after he unwrapped it, I could hear a page flip every two minutes as my neighbor was reading the book.

I couldn’t look away. The book we’d been working for almost 10 months was actually being read by someone right in front of me. At this point, I knew almost every single page of the book by heart, and I knew exactly which pages contained grammar or spelling mistakes that our readers had flagged. I didn’t say anything, though — of course.

As the time passed and I continued editing the chapter, I kept hearing the pages flip. The coach was silent and almost empty, yet this little whisper of flipping was full of something… remarkable and meaningful — something that I would remember for a long, long time after that trip.

I spent almost the whole night editing that one monolithic chapter, finishing just before the sun rose, as my neighbor continued flipping through the book every couple of minutes. I will never forget how, upon closing my laptop, I realized that even hours later the Mobile Book was still there, serving its purpose as the night wore on.

Since then, I always remember how worthwhile and empowering every single minute we’ve invested in Smashing Magazine felt in those few hours on the train.

Seven Years — And Counting!

This little website was launched exactly seven years ago today. We didn’t have an ambitious goal. We didn’t have a master plan. We just wanted to do what matters to us and provide value to our colleagues, fellows designers and developers out there. That train trip of mine is one of the reasons we are still doing it today. The trip throughout all these seven years changed everything for me, and these years still drive us in new directions and towards new challenges. And for this I am eternally, eternally grateful.

These seven years have changed everything because what we do does matter after all, and because you matter to us.

Our Birthday Present — To You.

We put our heart and soul into producing books that we love and that you will hopefully love, too. Good is not good enough, and we do everything we can to create beautiful and valuable artefacts of their time and keep them affordable to everyone worldwide.

To celebrate our little day today, we have prepared a little something for you. Well, obviously we can’t buy a round of beer for you just yet, but we do have something a bit more… permanent and special: a Smashing stress relief ball. That, and of course, for any printed book you grab, the international shipping is on us this week. But hey, don’t worry, no strings attached.

The Stress Relief Ball: Smash Me! — $7 (7€)

This adorable little fleecy fellow is super squishy and will put a smile on anyone’s face. Cody is a goodie that’s most certainly nice to have for your desk; he’s a great listener and an efficient stress absorber. Price is $7 (7€), with free shipping. You can also print your own Cody (PDF), you know. We’ll be giving away Codys to 30 people who comment on this post.

Smashing Book #3 Bundle (Print + eBook) — $27 (27€)

Our last Smashing Book contains practical coding and design techniques and features contributions from Aarron Walter, Rachel Andrew, Lea Verou, Christian Heilmann, Andy Clarke and Dmitry Fadeyev. If you want to know how to design websites today, don’t miss this bundle. Two damn good printed books and two eBooks in one fell swoop. Price is $27 (27€), with free shipping.

Smashing Book #3 + Mobile Book Bundle (Print + eBooks) — $47 (47€)

Here is a bundle of our two most recent books, which complement each other well. The Smashing Book 3 provides insight into the general design and coding workflow, while The Mobile Book has a strong focus on mobile techniques and strategies, the mobile landscape and mobile UX. That’s two high-quality print books and four eBooks in one fell swoop. Price is $47 (47€), with free shipping.

The Smashing Anthology (5×Print + 6×eBooks) — $77 (77€)

In all, we’ve released five printed books, all carefully edited and thoroughly reviewed according to the rigorous quality control that Smashing Magazine’s online articles are known for. The books cover the various areas of Web design and development and have come to be regarded as valuable, high-quality books for Web professionals. Price is $77 (77€), with free shipping.

Here’s To Another Seven Years!

The journey has just begun. We have a lot more in store, and we aren’t afraid of new challenges. In fact, we are happy to take this journey with you. A huge thank you to you for being so helpful, engaging and supportive, and for staying with us all this time, and for reading our books on night trains. It means the world to us. You mean the world to us.

It’s time to make a wish and blow out the candles.
Happy Birthday, SmashingMag. Happy Birthday, everyone!

© Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 2013.