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Google’s look, evolved

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Re: Google’s look, evolved

#121

Post by krapp »

branchless wrote: post #70
ErikHuisman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think these things might make a small difference but overall it's not important. I view Heineken as a boring lager which has little character, probably due to being produced in industrial quantities. A jaunty 'e' isn't going to fix that. Same for google. So long as they continue to bang out appropriate search results I'm with them. Right until they don't.

Logo design and typography are intended to affect you subconsciously, not consciously.

That tilted 'e' is meant to advertise the brand in the middle of dozens of other logos in the store, and draw consumers in from that myriad of choices based on psychological cues and associations they may not even be aware of. The effect is important in aggregate - some large number of potential customers conditioned over a lifetime of advertising to associate different typographic styles with emotional states and narratives being slightly more conducive to pick your beer over others than they otherwise might have been, because now it's 'nicer.'

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#122

Post by Nadya »

jonknee wrote: post #52
kyrra wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I was younger I didn't use Yahoo! because I disliked their logo and the use of ! in their name.

Petty? Yes. Did it effect their market share? By at least 1 - yes.

I highly doubt I was the only one to act like that. Design matters. Even if you don't think it does.

E:

For those wondering, I also didn't enjoy listening to Panic! At the Disco. They also eventually dropped the !.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#123

Post by thrownaway2424 »

27182818284 wrote: post #33
bad_user wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are automatically classifying photos. If you have photos in Google Photos, you can try it out with words such as "forest", or "dog", or "grill". It's pretty cool and scary at the same time :-)

I did not know they were doing anything other than identifying faces that you've already tagged. Grabbing the pumpkin, whatever out of the photo is just wonderful.

It's even better than that. It can recognize landmarks. I can ask it "Show me pictures of myself in Paris" and it finds 25-year-old scans that I uploaded that haven't got any kind of geographic data in the EXIF.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#124

Post by mrxd »

mahouse wrote: 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.

> There was literally nothing wrong with it, it did not look dated at all.

It definitely didn't look dated. That's because no other tech company in the world imitated Google's choice to use a font inspired by 15th century typography that literally looks like it was created with a calligraphy brush.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#125

Post by d23 »

jonknee wrote: post #52
kyrra wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota.

Ah, but it will. When you're a company like Google, with hundreds of millions of users a day, it's only a matter of time that something like an outdated logo will start to lose you customers. People make sub-conscious inferences about your product based on appearance. If you start looking like that thing everyone used to use, they'll start looking for alternatives.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#126

Post by hyperliner »

hodwik wrote: post #78
normloman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we need another paradigm? Stop designing websites to be identical.

Object-Oriented? Functional? Why do we need more programming paradigms? Stop writing programs to be identical.

Rim Shot

http://instantrimshot.com/

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#127

Post by nostrademons »

raldi wrote: 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 reason they did that was so that they could build up data on the effect of each factor independently. That way, when the bigwigs get into a meeting and discuss alternative designs, they can predict "Ok, this will have $X effect on revenue but will decrease search latency by Y ms, which itself will have +$X effect on revenue."

I was the first engineer on the first visual redesign that tried to change everything about the page [1]. One of our biggest problems was that since we tried to change everything at once, the metrics went haywire, and we couldn't know if a change was because we introduced a left-nav (okay, actually we kinda could, because we'd experimented with a left-nav on its own beforehand) or because we changed the line spacing or because we cleaned up the logo or because we added icons. There was effectively no way of "debugging" the user; when user behavior varied from expected, we didn't know why.

I've got plenty of other stories from that era, but they aren't really fit for a public forum. Happy to discuss privately. (Kinda ironic when the non-Googler says that to the Googler...)

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-...

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#128

Post by jegutman »

27182818284 wrote: post #33
bad_user wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are automatically classifying photos. If you have photos in Google Photos, you can try it out with words such as "forest", or "dog", or "grill". It's pretty cool and scary at the same time :-)

I did not know they were doing anything other than identifying faces that you've already tagged. Grabbing the pumpkin, whatever out of the photo is just wonderful.

You don't even need to tag faces. It finds all the faces that have been in your photos and picks one for each to be the search "face" for that person.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#129

Post by lemevi »

bradleyjg wrote: post #108
stormen wrote: 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 don't like it. It seems more juvenile in the same way comic sans gets criticized for. The loss of character on the lower case g is especially unfortunate. Non est disputandum I guess.

It seems off-putting right now, but even the Airbnb logo redesign has become less offensive looking over time looking so I think people will adjust to Google's new logo and look back and see the old version as outdated.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#130

Post by mankyd »

artursapek wrote: post #25

The favicon still hasn't changed: https://www.google.com/favicon.ico I can't imagine the nightmare it must updating the logo for a company like Google. There must be so many forgotten places that will be missed.

As of 13:33 EDT, it has. Just have to refresh.
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