

The design process behind the new Google icon - timr
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/one-fish-two-fish-red-fish-blue-fish.html

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dcurtis
This just goes to show how lost Google is regarding design.

They had no idea what kind of favicon to create, so they created 300 different
ones (some of them absolutely hideous) and chose an ugly lowercase G that
doesn't match Google's brand at all.

And blue? With a gradient? Why?

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aston
The lowercase g is a direct rip from their current logo. They actually did
very little restyling of it, at least for the purpose of the favicon.

It's kind of a clever variation on the "make your favicon just a piece of your
real logo" trend. Using the second G instead of the first is, in some
respects, pretty playful. Sucks that it's hard to recognize.

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mhartl
I noticed the new Google favicon a few days ago, and already hate it. Why use
a lower-case 'g'? That would make sense---if they changed their name to
'gooGle'.

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pg
The source of the trouble is that the uppercase G of their logo font is too
lightweight to look good by itself. The Yahoo Y looks pretty good, but the
Google G is all empty space. And it's probably not a font where you could get
away with cranking up the weight very much.

Basically, they've been hosed by bad design choices they made early on, and
which they now (rightly or wrongly) consider to be part of the company's
identity.

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aston
The selection of that particular font was made by Ruth Kedar, who's no design
lightweight.

<http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-01-14-n16.html>

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pg
What do you mean, "no design lightweight?" Presumably you're not basing that
statement on the fact that she designed Google's logo, since then it would be
a tautology. Are you basing it on other work of hers that you know and admire?
Or do you mean that she must be a good designer because she taught at
Stanford?

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aston
The point is that the logo font face was very intentionally chosen. It was not
created by happenstance and eventually adopted as good just because it was
old. If it's getting them into trouble now, it's not because it was a poorly
designed logo, just that it was poorly designed for the purpose of being a
favicon.

I won't speak to whether or not Ruth Kedar would qualify as a great designer
in everyone's eyes, but I would say being anything other than a Google
engineer with a passing interest in logo design would be enough to support my
point.

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briansmith
The main problem with the old favicon was the box around it. It looks bad in
the address bars of Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer. It also looks bad when
the browser doesn't do a good job of aligning the favicon with the text next
to it. I have exactly the same problem with my favicon and it isn't easy to
work around without going with a whole new design.

Anyway, did they do end-user tests on this design? I would be very surprised
if the results of a marketing/usability test support this change.

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delano
Poor graphic design is part of Google's charm.

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pg
I don't think they're so calculating that they do it deliberately though. I
think the powerful people there just have no design sense.

That's useful for startups to know. Any startup where design is a critical
ingredient will be at least to that extent protected from Google.

