Forum Moderators: goodroi
You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, the small icon you see in your browser next to the URL or in your bookmarks list. Some people have wondered why we changed our favicon -- after all, we hadn't in 8.5 years(!). The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we've also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.
Google's Marissa Mayer Explains The New Favicon [googleblog.blogspot.com]
How do you squeeze that much Brand into a 16x16 area?
How do you squeeze that much Brand into a 16x16 area?
Not sure it really matters
The way I see it the real question could be:
Does the avg user care about it?
How much (again for the avg user) brand recognition exists -if any-?
<edit>Indeed my questions are ONLY favicon related</edit>
dc
Also in my opinion the the lowercase 'g' although looks more contemporary doesn't look as authoratitve or as predominant as the uppercase 'G'.
New marketing guys with too much time on their hands :-)
P!
Frankly, my dear, who cares ?
This is confirmation that Google has grown up (bloated?) and acquired employees whom do not contribute to the bottom line.
[edited by: Edge at 1:51 pm (utc) on June 7, 2008]
EDIT: in fact after checking the article I see I _am_ getting a corrupted image, with the bottom part in black.
It seems to be a Mac blunder, I'm getting it on all my Macs, with Camino and Safari.
The new lower case g is an unnecessary distraction.
Google's new favicon iteration is, IMHO, a bad change. The old one was instantly recognizable, clean, "authoritative" as a capital, it just said "I am G for GOOGLE." It worked.
The new one is lowercase, and as already mentioned, less authoritative. It's also a much "softer," more artistic font, further diminishing its authority. The "shaded" background looks broken against a solid white background. It also breaks in Firefox some of the time, not just Safari, with a white top and black bottom (at least for me, in both *nix and windows). Its a less legible font, it takes a couple seconds to realize it's a "G" at all.
It breaks with the existing branding of Google's font schemes.
On the plus side, it vaguely suggests a Moebius Ring, suggesting "infinity" - a strong subconscious image for many people.
Overall, I give it grade C. A notch above "fail", but only a notch.
Note to the talented engineers at Google: Brush up your resumes. If Google can devote significant resources to a triviality such as this, then the Marketing and Management Wogs are taking over. Bad sign for Google's corporate culture.
p.s. My wife (the one in the family with the Graphic Arts degree), disagrees with me. She notes that corporate image trending over the past decade has been moving toward lower case logos. Lower case is "more flexible, less dogmatic and rigid", it's friendlier and more approachable.
She also berated me for being presumptive in giving it a "Grade C" when I didn't fully understand the reasoning behind the new choice.
I had to bite my tongue, because its Saturday and I haven't had enough coffee to get into the age old "Art that has to be explained isn't art, its just nonsense" argument.
When I have too much free time I go fishing insted of changing a winner ;-)
Strange though that they have choosen to, at this point and for the last few weeks change pretty much all of their pages to the new favicon except Adwords, i would have thought that once they made the decision to make the change, it would have been made universally across all of their products.
Some one in marketing was trying WAY too hard to come up with a problem that they had a solution for.
Frankly, my dear, who cares ?
You cared apparently enough to click all the way to this thread and actually type your comment. Lotsa care right there.
p.s. My wife (the one in the family with the Graphic Arts degree), disagrees with me. She notes that corporate image trending over the past decade has been moving toward lower case logos. Lower case is "more flexible, less dogmatic and rigid", it's friendlier and more approachable.
The experts seem to be the only ones who like it. I don't want to approach the G. I just want to see which tab is Google at a glance.
This is no big deal, but the fact that MM spends personal effort on this says a lot about what happens when a corporation succeeds beyond expectation...and why a juggernaut like Microsoft loses the edge after awhile..
I remember when our company was getting ready to go public and we brought in a marketing department. They spent a ton of money and energy on a new logo / business cards / letterhead (even though our old one was great!).... The day it came out, the rank and file noticed something that escaped the notice of the people who spent a year on it...the logo was almost identical to Toyota's... Ouch.
The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices.
This makes sense. The icon for the iPhone/Touch is 57x57 and they want to keep it uniform. We have created icons for our sites because they look better then the screen capture that is the default on the iPhone.
All it takes is adding a file called apple-touch-icon.png to get a very nice clean looking icon. Google obviously sees icons for hand helds as the future and wants to keep consistency.
Those iterations are really a small window into the design process for Google as a whole and it's pretty darn cool.
