So Google changed its logo on Tuesday and I've been low-key obsessed with it since, which is a weird thing to admit but here we are. If you haven't seen it yet: the old serif wordmark (the one that's basically been around, in one form or another, since 1999) is gone. In its place is this chunky, friendly, very deliberately un-serious sans-serif logotype, and on mobile it shrinks down to just a multicolor "G" dot, or four little bouncing dots while a page loads.
I opened about six tabs comparing old versus new before I even got to my coffee this morning. Thats not a great use of a Tuesday but here we are.
My first reaction, honestly, was "oh no, not another one." Weve been through this cycle so many times now it barely registers as news anymore — Yahoo did their 30-logos-in-30-days stunt back in 2013 before landing on their current mark, Microsoft flattened everything into tiles a few years back, eBay quietly redid their wordmark, AT&T did the globe thing. Companies redesign their logos, everyone on Twitter says it looks like a kindergarten made it, and then six months later nobody remembers it was ever different. Thats basically the pattern at this point.
But the Google one actually got under my skin a little, and I think I know why. Its not really a logo redesign, its a systems redesign wearing a logo as a mascot. The whole point, from what I can tell, is that this new wordmark and the dot and the four-color scheme all have to work identically whether theyre rendered as a 512px hero image on google.com or a 16px favicon on some Android watch face that doesnt even exist yet. The old serif Google logo looked great on a search results page. It looked like garbage shrunk down to icon size, all those serifs turning to mush. This new one is clearly built backwards from the smallest possible size, which is a genuinely different design problem than "make a nice logo."
I'm not 100% sold on it as a logo, if Im being honest. It reads a little too close to a kids' toy company for my taste, like something you'd see on a box of blocks. The old wordmark had actual personality in its letterforms, this new one is just... clean. Competent. Safe. Which I guess is the whole point when youre a company this size — you're not trying to make people fall in love with your logo, you're trying to make sure it doesn't break on a smartwatch in 2019.
The four-dot loading animation is the part I actually like without reservation though. Its such a small thing but it tells you the machine is thinking without making you stare at a spinner, and it does it using the same four brand colors instead of some generic gray circle. Little details like that are the stuff I actually notice more than the wordmark itself, and I'd bet most people who "hate" this redesign are really reacting to the wordmark and not registering the rest of the system at all.
Also worth saying: this is happening at more or less the same time Google reorganized itself under the new Alphabet umbrella, which they announced a couple weeks back. I dont think the timing is a total coincidence: new corporate shell, new visual identity to go with it, even if Search itself keeps the Google name and logo front and center. Feels like spring cleaning at a scale most of us will never experience professionally.
Anyway. Give it a month. Nobody remembers logo backlash after a month, ever. I still have people tell me they miss the old Windows Start button and that thing changed literally years ago. By October this new G will just be what Google looks like, and in five years someone will show the serif version to a teenager and theyll think it looks ancient, the same way Ive been informed my childhood computer fonts look "vintage" now, a phrase that made me feel about ninety years old when I heard it.
Going to go stare at the loading dots one more time before bed. Not sorry about it.