AOL have announced that they are to ditch their triangle and running man logo with its familiar blue branding in favour of a new  “simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever-changing images… one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal.” Along with a changing background (which the company are calling “reveals”) the new logo will see the word AOL go lowercase and become accompanied by a dot; something which AOL CEO Tim Amstrong claims will all make sense when the full brand revamp is revealed on 10th December.

The sneak preview AOL released shows the new logo with several different “reveals” and the feedback across the web so far is…. mixed. One opinion that keeps cropping up is that it’s all a bit mad and perhaps a little slap dash.

The amendments to the logotype- going lower case and adding the dot- don’t do enough to change our perspective of the brand if anything reducing the logotype from the bold symbolic AOL- full caps no dot- could do more damage than good taking away the emphasis of the bold brand name and making a brand name seem like any old word. AOL claim that having the o and the l as lower case is an excellent lead in to the dot. A lot of emphasis upon the dot it seems, it will siginify AOL plus something else such as Aol.Music

And then there is the changing backgrounds. Armstrong tells Paid Content that these changing “reveals” represent all the different things going on at AOL “underneath the surface”. The idea of a changing logo is nice but in practise it does very little to present a strong brand image and the concept is very similar to another highly successful search engine whose logo we often see accompanied by highly popular doodles.

Of course only having a sneak peak at the proposed brand image it is too early to be drawing conclusions, however, at this early stage a lot of people are starting to wonder whether AOL themselves know who they and what they want to be? Hopefully it will all become a little clearer on 10th December.