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Google’s look, evolved

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Re: Google’s look, evolved

#52
post #36
post #20

I'll be the first one to say it: I liked the older better. There was literally nothing wrong with it, it did not look dated at all.

They actually give a reason why they changed it in the blog post. Saying that the old one was designed for desktops and the new one is meant to scale better (for things like watches and phones I'd guess). Edit: to add from their design blog[0], the new logo can be sent to a client in 305 bytes of compressed SVG (vs 14,000 bytes for the old logo). So it helps with lower bandwidth. The design post also mentions scaling…

Yes, anytime there is a logo change there is a bunch of marketing talk about why. It's all bullshit. At the end of the day it was because someone wanted to make their mark and got a chance to do it. A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota.

And it will be slightly changed in another couple of years by some new VP who wants to shake things up and get that next promotion.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#53
Nice design, but dynamic logos for two days in a row... I don't know...

If anyone needs that, to disable these logos just add this URL:

   https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/*
To your ad-block list...

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#54

From the video: "Think about how far Google has evolved from the ten blue links." I do, and it's not always a good thing. Also, I don't think I'm a fan of that new typeface. The cutesiness with the rotated 'e' on the end is sort of teeth-grating to me: it breaks up the rhythm of the rest of the wordmark.

It looks a bit like Circular, which has also been adopted by Alphabet (see the page source for abc.xyz), Google's parent company. Circular has been quite popular of late with many companies adapting and adopting it for their identity.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#55

Just when I thought we might be starting to pivot away from flat design - does anyone know of a different design paradigm that is being used by smaller/fringe designers who are tired of flat/minimal UX/UI?

Relatively flat design is here to stay for a while. The trend though is getting away from purely flat, to flat with subtle edges, gradiens, shadows, etc. - generally flat design with better UI cues.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#56
post #49
post #6

I love it. Quite often logo redesign processes gets completely out of hand, but this was a significant improvement over the older version: Cleaner, more modern and beautiful in all its simplicity. Bravo!

I like the attention they brought to the angle/attitude of the 'e'. Never appreciated before how it has a friendlier feel.

It is pioneered by Alfred Heineken in 1954 to cheer up the brand Heineken.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#57
post #20

I'll be the first one to say it: I liked the older better. There was literally nothing wrong with it, it did not look dated at all.

It's design. It'll change even when it doesn't need to, almost by definition.

Wow, that's an uncharitable opinion of design and designers. They're highly-trained professionals too, and redesigns like this aren't done just for the heck of it -- according to the blog post, this measurably increases performance on small screens and in low-bandwidth contexts.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#59

Wait, what. At roughly the 1:34 mark, the voice pulls up photos of her kid with a pumpkin. Do you have to tag your photos with "pumpkin" first or is the recent "Choose the picture of waffles" in Recaptcha fueling that?

It's pretty terrific. You can search for things like "wedding" or "beach" or "birthday" or "christmas", people's names, "march 2008", "kyoto", etc, and it uses everything at its disposal: the image itself, the EXIF data, geotagging, the date it was taken, the filename, the album name...

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#60
post #9

2008 HN discussion from when the outgoing "little blue g" favicon was introduced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211518 In it, Dustin Curtis criticizes Google (rather rightly, in my hindsight-enhanced opinion) for a Marissa-Mayeresque design process of "Make 300 logo variants with pseudorandom permutations, and then pick your favorite." Looking at those permutations now ( http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZYqYi4xigk/S…

The new favicon is way better IMO. On the other hand, the main logo... I think this sums it up: "seem as much like a preschool as humanly possible".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153449

I'm just not a fan of extremely flat designs.

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