For those of you who missed it, AOL just announced a completely new brand:

Now, I’m no branding expert, but to me these logos look terrible. The images are simply horrid; it looks like they were found with Google Image Search, or possibly chopped out of a photo by an intern using Photoshop’s magic wand tool. The concept behind this new brand is that the wordmark can be superimposed over all sorts of images:

“The new AOL brand identity is a simple, confident logotype, revealed by ever-changing images. It’s one consistent logo with countless ways to reveal.

Hopefully, for AOL’s sake, the images above are simply a poorly executed proof-of-concept.

It turns out the company behind the new brand, Wolff Olins, has some pretty impressive previous work:

(You really need to see the London 2012 logo in action to fully appreciate the monstrosity of this logo.)

I really have no idea how Wolff Olins managed to sell such terrible logos to these huge organizations. The various news releases are chock-full of branding & identity drivel, and only further my suspicion that the majority of some branding experts are only a few degrees of separation from the social media experts.

Jack Donaghy would be jittering with excitement.