AOL Rebranding Disaster
November 27th, 2009 by MattAOL, in their effort to reimage themselves as a “new media” company, is rebranding. The bad news? They’re ditching the classic triangle-circle logo in favor of random imagery with the white text “Aol.” overlayed. That’s right, no more caps and an extraneous period.
While I think AOL’s focusing more on their blog holdings is a smart move, since dial-up internet is finally dieing out, their new branding is, to put it lightly, ridiculous. They are throwing away an iconic logo in favor of having no logo at all! Of the examples I’ve seen, the goldfish pictured above is the least amateur-looking.
I heard a neat idea on the Buzz Out Loud podcast. They should get their own TLD – .aol – and expand their blog holdings. They already own Weblogs Inc., so they’ve got a good start. AOL could launch a blog on an topic, and have their pick of a short domain name for each.
But whatever they’re planning…the bad logos (and “Aol.” moniker) need to die.