New AOL logos

Yesterday AOL released images of its new logo.  We’re going to spend some time looking at this “rebranding” effort to understand what the goals were, and whether they were successful.

I have to say I’m a little confused.  I thought AOL stood for America Online, and it turns out this used to be true, but it’s not anymore.  Now the company is just three letters that don’t stand for anything.  AOL is part of Time Warner, but will be spun off into a separate company in  a few weeks.  This probably has something to do with the new logos.

This whole new logo thing is being posted here because of the period at the end of the logo, but we’ll get to that later.  First I want to talk about the change from AOL to Aol.  If AOL still stood for America Online, I would have a real problem with this (America online?) but now I just don’t get it.  Maybe they thought having all caps was just too in-your-face, and normal capitalization is a little more cool.

Which brings us to the period at the end.  I am really struggling to understand why AOL Aol would do this.  If they wanted to go with the whole America online thing, maybe it would be to put some emphasis on the statement, like we are “America online.”  But then you might want to go more for “America. Online.” which would be A.Ol. or something terrible like that.  And of course they’re not America Online anymore, just AOL Aol, so that can’t be the reason.  The best possible reason I’ve read so far comes from this article, which speculates that the period could be a reference to how they could be using their web addresses in the future: Aol.mapquest, etc.

But how are you supposed to write about this company now?  Do you keep the period if Aol is in the middle of a sentence?  If so, they are going to create a lot of punctuation confusion.

I’ve tried to focus on the punctuation part of this logo redesign so I won’t address the most obvious head scratching part of the new logos: the images onto which the the text has been placed.  I’m guessing stock photos, for cost reasons (they are planning on laying off 2,500 people in the near future, after all).

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