So Google's had that new logo up for about two weeks now and I still catch myself doing a double take every time I open a new tab. You've seen it by now probably — they ditched the old serif wordmark (the one that had been there, more or less unchanged, since 1999) for this flat, geometric sans-serif thing in the same four colors. Blue, red, yellow, green, same order as always. Just... rounder. Friendlier. Like the old logo put on a cardigan.
I'll be honest, my first reaction on September 1st was pretty negative. It looked like a logo a design student would make for a class project called "reimagine a brand you love in Comic Sans's more respectable cousin." But logos are weird that way — you hate them for a week and then one day you just stop noticing, and by the time you notice again you realize you've stopped hating it. I'm most of the way there now. Not all the way. The dots-only "G" they use for the assistant thing still looks unfinished to me, like someone forgot to add the rest of the letters.
What actually got me thinking about it wasn't the shape of the letters though, it was the reasoning behind it, which Google spelled out in a blog post that I read twice because I found it more interesting than I expected to. The whole pitch is that Google isn't really a "website you visit" anymore, its a thing that shows up everywhere, on your watch, in your car dashboard, as a tiny icon crammed into a notification bar, sometimes with no room for anything except a single letter "G." A logo with fine serifs and subtle color gradients just falls apart at 16 pixels. A fat, friendly sans-serif doesn't. That's the whole game. It's not really a branding decision so much as a rendering-constraints decision that happens to also be a branding decision. Which, fine, I get it. I still think the old wordmark had more personality, but I also don't run a company that needs its logo legible on a smartwatch face the size of a nickel.
Anyway, in unrelated but definitely-on-my-mind news: I put in my pre-order for the new iPhone two days ago. 6s Plus, the 64GB one, space gray because I have no imagination when it comes to phone colors apparently. Setting an alarm for pre-order day is a genuinely dumb ritual that I do every single year and I don't fully understand why. It's not like the phone ships any faster if I click "buy" at 12:01am versus 9am with my coffee. I think it's just become part of the September routine at this point, like pumpkin flavored things showing up at the grocery store. The line at the actual store on launch day I can skip now, thankfully. I did that exactly once, back for the 4S, stood outside a mall in the cold for two hours next to a guy livestreaming himself to about six viewers, and decided that was enough of that particular experience for one lifetime.
The thing I'm actually curious about with this phone generation is the 3D Touch stuff, the pressure-sensitive screen thing where pressing harder does something different than a regular tap. I'm skeptical of it in the abstract, feels like the kind of feature that sounds great in a keynote demo and then six months later nobody remembers it exists, kind of like Force Touch on the trackpads before it, or 3D on TVs before that. But I've been wrong about this stuff before. I was sure nobody needed a bigger phone screen back in 2014 and then I used one for a week at a friend's place and went and bought the big one myself within a month. So we'll see. I'll actually have the thing in my hands in a couple weeks and I'll report back once I've lived with it instead of just speculating from a keynote livestream, which is a thing I have opinions about but that's a different post.
For now the tab bar still looks a little foreign to me every time I open the browser. Give it another two weeks, I figure, and I won't remember it ever looked any other way.