Hey! They’re moving back in the direction toward ever plainer-looking plain-old plain-text. Just a bit more in this direction, and we can all fire up our Lynx browsers again!
It looks like the label on a Fisher-Price toy for one-year olds.
I wonder: how many millions of dollars Google invested in designing this logo, and why do they think a new logo is important anyway? Will it affect their plans for world domination?
WordMan
September 4, 2015, 6:58pm
43
The New Yorker has a culture writer, Sarah Larson, who just posted “Why You Hate Google’s New Logo” - so I guess we know their position.
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-you-hate-googles-new-logo
When Google first appeared, in the late nineties, it distinguished itself with a combination of intelligence and friendliness. Other search-engine sites were as cluttered and garbagey visually as they were inefficient functionally, simultaneously trying to sell and inform and bamboozle. AOL, with its goofy mailbox, bulky structure, and overpriced hand-holding service for the terrified, was obviously up to no good. Others—Yahoo!, HotBot, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, and so on—seemed well intentioned but were harder to parse. Google’s design, in comparison, was a revelation. It had true confidence. It didn’t need to pretend to be the post office or a butler. The white glow of a clean, bare screen, the brightly colored, old-fashioned letters, the name that came from math and whimsy—it was all very promising, and its brilliance spoke for itself. The logo was a key part of this. The design, like the site, didn’t patronize or manipulate—it said, Relax, we’re reasonable geniuses, the smartest possible combination of man and machine. Let us find what you need.
and
Google, in the announcement, describes the change as part of “a new logo and identity family” for use on “even the tiniest screens.” But would a few serifs have been so cumbersome? We don’t instinctively care about the brand unity Google wants to achieve with its new mega-company, Alphabet, of which it is now a part. Especially because Alphabet takes our most elementally wonderful general-use word—the name of the components of language itself—and reassigns it, like the words tweet, twitter, vine, facebook, friend, and so on, into a branded realm. In Larry Page’s letter explaining it to us, Alphabet is illustrated with a bunch of kids’ building blocks. Operation Childlike Innocence, Phase One.
When Google changes their logo again in a few years we’ll be right here complaining about how much better the old one was.
BigT
September 6, 2015, 6:42pm
45
chappachula:
It looks like the label on a Fisher-Price toy for one-year olds.
I wonder: how many millions of dollars Google invested in designing this logo, and why do they think a new logo is important anyway? Will it affect their plans for world domination?
Because they moved to Alphabet, and the gimmick is that every service is represented by an uppercase letter of the alphabet. And the font is consistent in all of them. So they redesigned the log.
Again, my problem is just that stupid white circle with the rainbow G. It looks instantly dated.