New design at Yahoo! has users still seeing purple

One of the world's top five search engines, Yahoo! has already undergone a company makeover since hiring wunderkind CEO Marissa Mayer last year and now it's giving its logo a fresh start.

The logo that it sticks with for the long term — presumably — won't be unveiled until Sept. 4, but starting Wednesday, the company began rolling out 30 logos in 30 days leading up to the final look.

On Day One of the monthlong marketing campaign, Yahoo! replaced its old logo - with a playful, almost bubbly font - for a sleek, modern font, described by the Washington Post earlier today as "sans-serif font, similar to the fonts that other companies such as Microsoft, Google and Apple have used to signal a clean, modern look to their products."

The familiar — one might say defining — exclamation point remained with the new version. The fairly new purple hue, adopted since Mayer took the helm, also remained.

"The new logo will be a modern redesign that's more reflective of our reimagined design and new experiences," Yahoo! chief marketing officer Kathy Savitt said in a press release posted today. "We also want to preserve the character that is unique to Yahoo! — fun, vibrant, and welcoming — so we'll be keeping the color purple, our iconic exclamation point and of course the famous yodel. After all, some things never go out of style."

During Mayer's first year, the company has already redesigned its homepage and purchased social media platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion.

Yahoo! was ranked the third largest search engine at the end of last year, according to figures from Dec. 2012 posted on website Search Engine Land. Google remains the undisputed search king, handling 65 percent of the world's searches, according to those December figures. It was followed by a Chinese-based search engine called Baidu, then Yahoo!. Russian search engine Yandex and Microsoft's Bing rounded out the top five.