Google’s New Logo
We should get one thing straight first: the serif Google logo we’ve gotten used to seeing since 1999 — that’s 16 years, a period in which many of us have built our professional careers and relied on Google to do so many things — is not good. Not by any standard. It’s an old-looking, disproportionate piece of typography that no designer would think of using in a logo pitch to a client. We currently think it’s good and many are mourning its demise not because it was a great piece of design like the IBM logo but because we’ve grown so accustomed to it that anything different is an assault on what we know to be dear and true on the internet. To me, it was about time for that logo to go away.
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One of the aspects that makes this redesign interesting is that they have bestowed logo duties on three separate elements: there is the logo, a set of dots, and a monogram. The impressive thing about this is that all three scream Google on their own — even the dots, simply by being the Google colors. You won’t mistake them for Microsoft dots, that’s for sure. The three elements, together, are the representation of the brand at every point: when you fire up an app through the G monogram, while the app is thinking through the dots, and when the app is loaded through the wordmark. This is a very clever way of building a visual ecosystem that imprints the Google DNA at every turn.
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Any other solution to the logo — anything more effusive, more visible, more different, more visually explosive — would have been met with terrible anger. This “boring” solution is safe and almost expected but it’s extremely appropriate.
Update (2015-09-11): Thomas Benkö compares the colors with Microsoft’s logo.
Update (2015-10-14): Jaume Sanchez Elias (via ange):
In this post I’ll talk a bit about techniques and tricks learned while trying to recreate the new Google logo with SVG in 305 bytes (or less!).
