The explanation (excuses) explained:
• We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo—whimsical, yet sophisticated. Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud. (all meaningless chiches)
• Other elements fell quickly into place (we threw this together at the last minutes so we could hit the bar)
• We didn't want to have any straight lines in the logo. Straight lines don’t exist in the human form and are extremely rare in nature, so the human touch in the logo is that all the lines and forms all have at least a slight curve (we'd already hit the bar and couldn't draw straight lines)
• We preferred letters that had thicker and thinner strokes - conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do. (because some of us are fat and some of us are skinny)
• Serifs were a big part of our old logo. It felt wrong to give them up altogether so we went for a sans serif font with "scallops" on the ends of the letters. (because the CEO said curvy ends and serifs were the same thing)
• Our existing logo felt like the iconic Yahoo yodel. We wanted to preserve that and do something playful with the OO’s. (so me made them minimally different so nobody can tell if it was intentional or not)
• We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark. (I have no idea what in the hell that's supposed to mean unless it's that mathematically we blew our logo design budget at the track and had to slop this together at the last minute)
• We toyed with lowercase and sentence case letters. But, in the end, we felt the logo was most readable when it was all uppercase, especially on small screens.
Our last move was to tilt the exclamation point by 9 degrees, just to add a bit of whimsy (we typed in the name, scrolled through the fonts, didn't find a good one so we settled on the last one, then Carl rotated the excalamation point a little so it would be "custom".)