So Google redid its logo on Tuesday. If you missed it (how, though, it was on the homepage of the actual search engine everyone uses forty times a day) - the old serif wordmark, the one that's basically been around since 1999 with only minor touch-ups, is gone. In its place is this new geometric sans-serif thing, custom-drawn, apparently they're calling the typeface Product Sans internally. And the spinning circle loading animation got replaced by four little dots in the brand colors that bounce around while a page loads.
I have opinions about this, obviously, because I am exactly the kind of person who has opinions about kerning.
First reaction, honestly: I didn't hate it as much as I expected to. The old logo had this baked-in drop shadow that made it look like it was hovering slightly above the page, a very late-90s, early-2000s design tic that frankly should've died with frames and animated GIF counters. Getting rid of that alone is an improvement. The new one is flat, sits right on the page, doesn't pretend to have physical depth it doesn't have. Fine. Good, even.
But the letterforms themselves are doing something a little weird to me. The lowercase "g" in particular has this open, almost childlike quality that I keep going back and forth on - it reads friendly, which I assume is the entire point (Google wants to feel like it lives on your phone and your watch and your car dashboard now, not just a desktop browser tab, so "approachable" makes sense as a design goal). But there's a version of friendly that tips into twee, and some hours I think this crosses that line and other hours I don't. I looked at it probably eleven separate times today trying to decide, which is a genuinely absurd amount of time to spend on a company's wordmark, but here we are, this is apparently my Tuesday now.
The four-dot loading animation is the part I actually like without reservation. It's such a small thing but it's doing real work - it tells you Google is thinking, in a way that feels more alive than a spinner ever did, and it uses all four brand colors instead of just blue, which somehow makes the whole system feel more coherent even though logically that shouldn't matter. Small detail, but small details are usually where you can tell whether a redesign was done carefully or done by committee in six weeks to hit a launch date.
Anyway. Here's the tangent, because you knew there'd be one: this whole thing sent me down a hole of looking at my own header image on this blog, which I made in maybe twenty minutes back in 2012 in GIMP and have not touched since. It's got a drop shadow on the text. A DROP SHADOW. In 2015. I am, apparently, exactly the design-forward tech blogger I was making fun of two paragraphs ago, except worse, because at least the old Google logo's drop shadow was intentional and consistent across their whole product line, and mine is just... there, because I didn't know what else to do with Georgia at 36px eight years ago and never revisited it.
I'm not going to redo it tonight. I've got Metal Gear Solid V sitting half-installed on my PS4 from launch day last week and that is a much better use of my remaining evening than relearning Photoshop's layer styles panel. But it's on the list now, mentally filed next to "eventually move off this ancient WordPress theme," a list that has apparently existed since roughly November 2011 and grown by exactly zero completed items in that time.
What I keep coming back to with the Google thing is that a logo change at that scale isn't really a logo change, it's an infrastructure change. Every icon, every app tile, every favicon, every piece of stationery (do they still print stationery? someone there does, I assume) has to update more or less simultaneously across a company with, what, tens of thousands of employees and products running on every platform that exists. Rolling that out cleanly is a genuinely hard coordination problem that has nothing to do with whether the "g" looks a little too round for my taste. Give the design and eng teams there some credit for pulling it off without the site looking broken for a week, because that's the part that actually would've been the story if they'd botched it.
I'll probably like the new one more in six months. That's usually how it goes with these.