Google unveils new logo

How long do you think it will last?

[ronin]

Ummm.

Yuck.

BBC: [bbc.com...]

Official announcement: [googleblog.blogspot.co.uk...]

[moTi]

techies arrogating to be graphic artists.

coding is one of the disciplines you either master or have absolutely no knowledge of. pretty sophisticated like all mathematic sciences. there's not much in between, all or nothing.

out of the superiority complex that programmers are skilled in something that most people have no access to comes a mentality that they can even manage tasks outside their subject area. and design is one of the fields prone to that. everyone claims "well, that's easy, everyone can do that".

typical hybris of coders. the logo totally looks like that. it has as much style as an ugly nerd.

[Solution1]

I ran the logo through an online font recognition service. It came up with these 5 fonts that look quite similar:

• Futura SH Medium
  
• Relish Pro Medium
  
• Windlesham Pro Medium
  
• Guildford Pro Medium
  
• Maax Medium

None of these fonts look exactly the same as Google's logo.

I'd say that the capital "G" looks most like Windlesham. The "o" and "l" look about the same as in any of these fonts. The "g" looks most like the one in Maax, but is not exactly the same. The turned "e" is there in Relish, Windlesham, and Guildford, but it is turned at a larger angle in the logo.

[lucy24]

the favicon looks like a multi colored version of the Green Bay packers logo

It makes me think of the spinning beachball. I keep expecting it to rotate.

[ronin]

[...] why is this on the front page of webmasterworld.
is this an important news item for webmasters?

It's not a Richter Scale 8 news item like Google ditching Authorship photos in the SERPs (or even FB buying Oculus Rift), but for those of us who run businesses on the web it is noteworthy that companies as large and successful as Facebook and Google have both felt it necessary to update their logos this year (just as Microsoft did 3 years ago).

When was the last time Hewlett Packard updated its logo? What about Intel? Or LG? Or Samsung?

It suggests to me that web-based companies which serve millions of daily active end-users feel more keenly that their logo and branding should "stay current" in the eyes of those users - in contrast to other companies who merely emboss their logo on the units they sell to businesses and to end-consumers.

Perhaps the rest of us who run businesses on the web should (at least) take note?

[Leosghost]

When was the last time Hewlett Packard updated its logo?

April 2015..reason given by Meg W...."The Split"
[theregister.co.uk...]

[lucy24]

I still prefer the old Apple logo with the multicolored stripes. That's been, what, 10 or 15 years?

[Robert Charlton]

My assumption is that in large part, the new logo was implemented because of legibility on small screens.

Additionally, I've seen discussion that it may somehow be more efficient . I actually haven't tried to get my head around whether this actually will affect the file size of most graphics that will use it, but it's conceptually interesting. Would love to see some discussion of this here...

How Google's new logo is just 305 bytes?
[top5techs.com...]

There's also Google's own restructuring [abc.xyz...] Alphabet's home page heading...

G
is for Google

Certainly works better in the new font.

[Leosghost]

In the word Google ..the yellow O in the new font looks slightly smaller than the red O next to it, yes, it is an optical illusion due to the way our brains process red next to yellow, but it looks "off"..
Had they increased the kerning* just a smidgen between the red O and the yellow O and also between the yellow O and the "bowl" of the lower case "g"..that might have helped..

*Not the first time I've linked to this..
[xkcd.com...]

Enjoy ;)

[tangor]

The real frolic here is the creation of an entire typeface "Product Sans", and in that there are costs for designers, editors, artisans and management. It is "cute" for screen devices, but rather shallow for PRINT applications... and in all cases appears to be a DISPLAY font (ie, short text, word or two) and barely useful as a text font (body). In all I like it as a fan of fonts. I collect 'em. :)

Is it worth the dollars G spent? As a branding tool that will come with time.

[Robert Charlton]

LG... re kerning, I agree... but I've got to assume that they tested, reviewed, and are testing some more, and may have other objectives that are clouding this issue. Back when corporate style guides were printed on paper, I saw the style guide for Coca-Cola, and it was a huge volume with newspaper-sized pages. They had logos plotted out for every variation from business card to letterhead to bottle to can to bill-board. Different kerning, thicks and thins, and sometimes letter shapes as well.

Some small ad agencies I've worked with, which are run by good designers, do the same thing on a smaller scale for their clients. So this isn't just a mega-company thing. Even I... with MS Word or Photoshop... spend time kerning for various business forms, DVD labels, etc.

Regarding red next to yellow, that's a tough one. I tend to agree that the current kerning is currently too tight, but there may be other issues.

It's interesting to compare the kerning on two examples you can view right now in different tabs and switch back and forth...

Alphabet... [abc.xyz...]
- grey and white, used in text rather than as a logo, and smaller than the main Google search logo, and larger than the logo on upper left in serps pages. This "Google" has more space between letters than either of these full color logos. Because this is mono-tone, you can't test your theory about whether this would fix the optical illusions seen in the color logos, but I'm thinking it might.

Google... [google.com...]
- as noted above, both the front page and the serps page are more tightly spaced than the text on Alphabet. Perhaps these are tighter because they're logos and Google designers (or their bosses) feel that logos should be more tightly spaced than words in text.