Purple is one of those love-it-or-hate-it-colors.
I personally have always enjoyed it because it’s deep and rich, but to other people, it’s horrid.
Yahoo! is in the process of a total brand makeover, ditching the stale design of the past for a sleeker, more Windows/Apple-style minimalist look.
Part of the revamp was changing the Yahoo! weather app. After all, Apple has a slick looking weather app, and so do plenty of third-party providers, so it only makes sense that Yahoo! evolve with the times.
Pretty much everyone loved the new Yahoo Weather app, except for one thing: the purple logo.
“Officially the ugliest icon ever,” said one Twitter user in response to the update. “Its icon isn’t home page worthy,” said another. Some used their available Twitter character counts to criticize the icon with even more ruthless efficiency: “That icon is ass.”
The logo was pretty ugly, but not because it was purple, it’s because it had an ugly gradient from top to bottom. And while it seems more like a few disgruntled users, Yahoo! soon quietly changed the app to a simple blue cloud background, which looked odd and somehow worse. The backlash intensified until they brought back the original purple app logo.
It was a page out of the “New Coke” branding strategy.
According to John Brownlee of FastCoDesign, however, there’s a certain “purple-hate” that stretches back generations:
But for thousands of years, we’ve been culturally associating purple with wealthy, out-of-touch dynasties. We don’t want to think of our favorite Internet companies as kings or priests. We want to think of them as scrappy, revolutionary upstarts, tearing the kings and priests down and putting everyone on an equal footing.
That’s the problem with purple, and part of why Yahoo’s allegiance with the color is such a polarizing decision for many. To Yahoo, purple represents imagination and innovation, but to many of us, the color rankles against the implicit egalitarianism of the Digital Age.
That’s ridiculous. Zero people in this generation still assert “purple” with anything royal, unless you’re talking about “Crown Royal”. The vast majority of people alive today and using this app have no connection to some inbred hate of royal colors—this isn’t exactly some 16th century crowd here.
Brownlee tries to base this claim off of Tumblr founder David Karp saying “we’re not turning purple” when Yahoo! bought Tumblr. Somehow, “not turning purple” is associated with Tumblr “[keeping]…its indie street cred”.
That’s just because Tumblr users were afraid that Yahoo! would turn Tumblr into some subsidiary site and destroy it. It has nothing to do with color or centuries-expired cultural connotations.
Thankfully, purple is here to stay.
