A while ago I posted two Yahoo! logos on my website, asking the audience to tell, which one is the original Yahoo! logo made by Yahoo! and which I have re-created using Macromedia Fireworks.

Now comes the long-awaited answer:

Yahoo! logo #1 is the one I made, and Yahoo! logo #2 is the original Yahoo! logo from the Yahoo! Messenger starting screen, captured as screenshot while the Yahoo! Messenger was loading.

I thank everyone for their participation, votes and comments:-)

I’d like to thank you here especially Alan Musselman from Adobe (formerly Macromedia), whose answer and comment was one of the most thougthtful and thouroughful ones:

Definitely the one on the left (#1). The only way I noticed is the Y is not proper like the Yahoo! branding. :) Good job though… I will also say the shadow on the teeth is a little stronger on #1 as well. If it wasn’t for these two things I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. :)

Both remarks are correct – the “Y” wasn’t perfectly made, and the shadow on the teeth is a bit different. Also, a lot of people reported that Y! logo #2 is somewhat saved with a bit worse compression than Y! logo #1 and because of that they presume #2 is the original logo, because probably it’s a screenshot and thus, was saved with worse compression and some artifacts, while #1 was exported from a high-quality vector-based file.

You were correct!:-)

(Note to myself: Always save screenshots with highest possible quality from now on, if a similar riddle will be published again by me, and the secret must not be revealed so easily;-)

Now, on to the raw numbers:

• 7 votes go for the option that the first Y! logo is the original one, and the 2nd is my work (the fake one)
• 9 votes go for the option that the second Y! logo is the original one and the 1st is my work (the fake one)
• Finally, 4 people voted that they either: can’t tell the diference between them, that both logos are fake or that they should not tell which is which;-)

My goal in this experiment was not to make a perfect imitation of the Yahoo! logo from the Messenger screen, but rather to try to quickly make a copy, which would be at least partially hard to be distinguished from the original, and see, how much time this would require in Macromedia Fireworks.

I’d say, the results are pretty satisfying. A number of people were fooled by my imitation, and as to the time needed, I think the copy was done in less than 10 or 15 minutes. I may try to repeat this experiement one of these days, with more zeal from my part, and more attention to the detail:)

I’ll publish here the original PNG file from Fireworks 8, in case someone’s interested to see how the vector copy was made.

Thanks again to everyone for the comments, votes and suggestions!

Now off to Microsoft website, to download a fresh copy of Windows Vista logo for a new series of Fireworks fun;-)