'Ewww:' Is AOL yellow now? Users poke fun at new color scheme that ditched classic blue

USA Today

22-03-2025

'Ewww:' Is AOL yellow now? Users poke fun at new color scheme that ditched classic blue
AOL's recent transformation has not gone unnoticed.
AOL ditched its classic blue interface, opting for a bright yellow color scheme on its app. It's not immediately clear when the New York-based web portal and online service provider made the change, but it happened. And many who still use AOL aren't all that thrilled.
"I've been a loyal @AOL user since the 90s. Most of my jr high girl drama was carried out over AIM. I've stuck with them even when people give me a hard time about it," Ashlee Hightower wrote in a Monday X post. "But AOL changing the color scheme of their app to yellow might be my jumping off point."
Though the majority of AOL users who voiced their thoughts about the change on social media were anti-yellow, one AOL user does "love" the yellow.
"It seems as though 80% of my apps are blue - the new AOL logo sticks out like a sore thumb," Mike Clark wrote on X Tuesday. Well done. *and yes - I still have AOL."
Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that purchased AOL from Verizon, did not immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment about the color scheme change on Friday.
AOL users react to sudden color scheme change on social media
Though the logic or motivation behind AOL's new look isn't clear, the move may have been a nod to the retired "yellow running man" that defined the AOL brand through the mid 2000s, online publication Distractify reported.
JoRoan Lazaro, then-creative director at The Martin Agency in New York and AOL's logo designer, told The Atlantic in 2014 that the inspiration behind the memorable "yellow running man" came from 1940s and '50s postwar American logos and trademarks.
"If you go back to '40s and '50s logos and trademarks, you'll see that there's actually quite a few men that were used − a silhouette that either had curved legs or angular legs and a round head, in addition to the ones that looked quite a bit more stylized or looked really, really human," Lazaro told the publication. "The running man was really inspired by those."
The "yellow running man" was officially retired in 2017.
Current AOL users do not seem to have noticed the connection between the old logo and the new color scheme. See what some AOL users have said about AOL's new look on social media.
What is AOL?
AOL, previously known as America Online, was a computer service company turned internet service provider that got its start in 1985, Time reported.
Eight years later, AOL introduced its own version of electronic mail services, email addresses, a Windows version and access to the rest of the Internet for its users. By 2000, it was the nation's biggest internet provider and worth $125 billion, later merging with Time Warner, according to reporting by Time.
AOL and Time Warner split by 2009 as a result of financial strain from slowing subscriber growth and declining ad revenue, Time reported.
"For me, watching AOL over the last ten years has been hard because in the 90s it really was the dominant company that helped define the internet for so many people, helped bring so many people online for the first time but it's been a struggle," AOL co-founder Steven Case said in a 2010 interview.
AOL continued to "chug along," making money off of its dial-up business and through the acquisition of media properties like the Huffington Post in 2011, Time reported. Verizon purchased both AOL and search engine Yahoo four years later.
AOL and Yahoo are now owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management.