There is a lot of hate on for the new Aol. logos, and I don’t particularly like them either. This is not going to be a gushing fan post. There is something about them that has caught my eye though.
Take a look at where they were most recently:
This is a standard, tech-style kind of logo you would find on an internet company’s wall. It says their name, ostensibly tells you they are “moving forward” with that arrow pointing the way, which without going on a side tangent, is a fairly hackish way to guide a viewer. It’s bubbly and blue, and just bleeds how INTERNET AOL is. Aol. could have kept going with this for some time and been just fine.
They didn’t keep going though, they started thinking about their brand perception and how they’re being seen by the world. They’ve gone from an All Caps AOL to a sentence case Aol. Note that period after Aol. As an aside, I’m actually struggling to include these periods in this post without throwing off the whole flow, and I’ll stop using it from here on out. So Aol period is now a slightly friendlier name, as far as you can go without actually having an actual word as a name. The period actually serves a purpose, separating the name from the category, Aol.Sports, AOL.News and so on.
Friendly typography sounds like a load of crap, but it actually works. It allows users to connect with a company that seems to be the equivalent of a buddy you can have a beer with. Now they’re embracing how users think of them already going from a harsh acronym, to hide the days of America Online to what is almost a word in itself. Eh-oh-ell.
Now the interesting part to me is how they are using that typography. They’ve created a flexible logo that changes according to the context. They can now add this logo to almost anything, owning the imagery. Football scores? Stamp “Aol.” on Terrell Owens. Weather reports? Stamp “Aol.” on imagery of the actual weather.
This is a not just a flexible logo now, it signifies a flexible brand that can expand well past America Online and start touching on their world of properties. With this brand backed up by solid changes to the company, they can attempt to shake the perception of an out of touch dotcom age company catering to grandparents, and start engaging customers on the level they are capable of, potentially as a challenger to Yahoo!’s services. They’ve got the awkward punctuation down.
My problem with the logo and brand as it is, they’ve taken this great flexible idea and piled it on a bunch of shit imagery they seem to have grabbed from a stock catalog. This was their opportunity to grab some compelling imagery related to each section of Aol and integrated it into their communications. Now I realize this was all sample imagery and they haven’t rolled it out across the board yet, so when this comes to their site I hope they do something a little more aggressive with it.
I’ve added in my own quick little paste up of what I think it will look like, but I suspect they will probably launch a completely revamped web presence soon though, something that uses this brand system a little more effectively than we see now.
Overall, great idea, horrible implementation AS WE SEE IT. I have high hopes for this moving forward.
