September 7, 2015 by wezank

The Google Logo Change: what and why?

Google has been making headlines for the past month. After introducing a new mother company, Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to change the leading engine’s logo for the biggest refresh the design has seen since the company’s introduction in 1998.

We interact with Google on a daily basis for different reasons. Whether we’re checking our mail, searching for the best restaurant to have dinner, navigate around the new city or the many other Google services, the company, and dare I say it, knows more about us than we do ourselves.

The reviews were mixed:

Some loved it.

Google’s new logo animation is the bomb.

— Charm Mallen (@SiGraceJo) May 10, 2015

Others, not so much.

Google’s new logo screams: “Too childish to be evil.”

— Seth Fiegerman (@sfiegerman) September 1, 2015

With design being one of our most important factors, we decided to dig deeper into what the new logo is all about and the reasons for this change.

The What

Design wise, aside from the same color scheme ( blue, red, yellow, blue, green red), the change is big. Google’s old logo used to be 14,000 bytes whereas the new animated logo is only 305 bytes. The reason for that is that the old one consisted complicated serif font created from bezier curves. The result: 100 anchor points, resulting in a 6 KB file. The new logo however, is build of nothing but simple circles and rectangles (except for the lower case g). The result: 10 circles, 5 rectangles, 1 shape with 7 anchor points (the g, remember?)

The Why

Digging deeper into the reasons for the Google logo change, it all adds up. For starters, having introduces Alphabet, Google had to mirror it’s mother company design and stick to the same identity without drifting aways from the basics.

Aside from that and with the company setting foot in the tech realm (self-driving car, smartwatch et..), public perception became a huge concern. Protecting the company being perceived as a computerised machine, the company made the logo feel more human.

Last but not least, the Google logo change shows how designers are thinking mobile first. Having a simpler design, they can optimize it onto smaller screens adding the “friendly” to “mobile”.