Web giant Yahoo has updated its logo with slimmer letters, while keeping its familiar purple colour and exclamation mark.
"We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo - whimsical, yet sophisticated," Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer said in a blog post. "Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history. Having a human touch, personal. Proud."
On the Yahoo home page, visitors will see the familiar exclamation mark dancing along the letters before settling at the end of the name at a slight angle.
The updated logo comes as the internet pioneer continues a quest to re-invent itself after being eclipsed by Google in the world of online search.
Mayer says the Yahoo team "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."
As a result, the design has "thicker and thinner strokes - conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do," Mayer said.
She added that the new logo evokes the "Yahoo yodel" by making the final O larger than the first.
"We wanted to preserve that and do something playful with the OO's," Mayer said.
"We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark."
The unveiling generated considerable reaction on social media and tech blogs, much of it unfavourable.
Silicon Valley gossip blog ValleyWag called the new logo "ugly", and the news blog TechCrunch noted that users still preferred the old design.
"Yahoo! turned the logo refresh into a month-long event, a purple smoke and mirrors affair to mask inactivity with marketing," wrote Sam Biddle on ValleyWag.
