Google refines logo as it prepares to join Alphabet.
This image provided by Google show’s the company’s new logo. The revised design unveiled overnight features the same mix of blue, red, yellow and green that Google has been using throughout its nearly 17-year history, though the hues are slightly different shades.Google unveiled a new logo on Tuesday morning, and it’s already been the subject of a slew of aesthetic critiques, including a positive review by Slate Web designer Derreck Johnson. It’s now a sans-serif typeface — a look that aligns with Alphabet’s logo — and according to the company’s release it’s specifically designed for the mobile user, with the “tiniest screens” in mind.
When it comes to corporate logos, details like font and color matter, as do stylistic flourishes like an upward-tilted “e.” But Google’s new logo isn’t just about looks. In the constantly evolving tech field, Google isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last to make big or small logo alterations to best appeal to its users. It’s about scalability and action, and it tells us a lot about the future of branding in a world of smartphones, smartwatches, GIFs, and mobile video.
Sometimes you just have to search for something, and at those times, even when you start your search in the app or the beckoning bar at the top of your browser, you wind up on Google’s white page, the logo with its multiplying O’s standing proudly for you to see. As Fast Company’s Mark Wilson explains, sans serif fonts like Google’s new “product sans” are more legible than serif fonts when shrunk to fit on tiny screens, like those on Google Glass or Android Wear devices.
Given the sheer volume of time that we spend staring into the Internet day after day, a bad change to the layout of one of our favorite Web sites or the logo of a favorite search engine (I say “a favorite search engine” just in case Bing is in the room) is the equivalent of removing our favorite couch. A little more human if you will: Having been through a logo change at an iconic Internet company — Yahoo — I can say that swapping these things out is quite an undertaking.
Our business is focused on creating world-class experiences for consumers and AOL is centered on creative and talented people – employees, partners, and advertisers,” AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said at the time. The Mountain View, California, company is pouring so much money into so many far-flung projects that have little or no connection to its main business of online search and advertising that it’s getting ready to place everything under the Alphabet umbrella.
On July 1, Facebook updated its logo once again, slightly thinning the font and rounding out the lower-case “a.” Did you notice? “From now on, this bird will be the universally recognizable symbol of Twitter. (Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter,)” reads a post from 2012 explaining the platform’s logo evolution. “There’s no longer a need for text, bubbled typefaces, or a lowercase ‘t’ to represent Twitter.” Under this setup, Google will retain search, YouTube and most of the biggest divisions while smaller operations such as Nest home appliances, life sciences, drone deliveries and venture capital investments will operate as individual companies. Every building, every app, every page, every piece of schwag, every blog has to get changed (and 5,000 things that I can’t think of at this moment).
For instance, Fast Company’s Wilson notes, when you begin a voice search: The Google logo will morph from “Google” into the dots, which undulate like water in anticipation of your query. The overhaul also will change the appearance of the letter “g” that Google uses as its shorthand logo on the smaller screens of smartphones and other mobile devices. A swirl of dots in Google’s colours will also appear when a spoken command for information is being processed or one of the company’s other services is performing a task. In the course of this I keep trying to Google things and being unable to find the window because I can’t imagine that a site with this horrid, Comic-Sans-looking monstrosity in the top corner would be the home of a reputable search engine. Google’s logo change is emblematic of the Web’s broader move from static, skeuomorphic, “page”-based design to something more fluid and adaptable.
For better or worse, dancing logos could become as much a fabric of the mobile Internet as responsive design and autoplay videos. (Of course, Internet companies didn’t invent the animated logo—think of Pixar’s lamp, or even MGM’s roaring lion.) In Google’s case, the animation is meant as a visual cue that something is happening: speakers listening, cloud servers processing. For advertisers, animated logos may become just another way to grab an instant of your attention in a mobile landscape where it’s more precious than ever.