Try telling .aol their logos are wrong:
Oh the irony. 🙂
From the very article you got that image from…
My snarky two cents: The long term problem here is the original name decision — America, On Line? Six syllables (which forced initials) plus a counterproductive meaning — the Web is inherently and joyously global, isn’t it? AOL should now have faced up to this fundamental identity problem, which has been compounded of late by a performance reputation problem, and fixed it with a name change.
“Instead, we have a design solution that diminishes, lower-cases, reverses and virtually hides the initials, as if apologizing for them. (It’s a visual equivalent of “if you have nothing to say, talk faster and louder.”)
“To be sure, mutable wordmarks (visual play, around consistent letterforms) can be fun. Certainly, MTV and Nickelodeon showed you can get away with it on television, and Google has shown it can work on the Web. But are these particular “Aol.” letterforms a strong-enough visual anchor? Not clearly. Verbally, they are still a hole in the hull.
“And are we now expected to write not AOL but Aol? (I refuse to add the period, in text.) And thus to speak it as a-awl, or a-owl? The punctuation of the logo introduces uncertainty of the name in text applications… which is not a good a way to build a stronger brand.”