As one of the most popular internet company that works on many things, the search giant Google has changed its logo more than often throughout its life. But the logo that was unveiled on September 1st, 2015, is its biggest change in 16 years.
Google's logo has been sitting on top of its search bar, and on appearing when its apps are booting. Since the beginning of its time, the Google homepage has always been simple, with a multicolored logo placed above a search field on a plain white canvas. But as technology evolves, Google inputs a lot more information than just searches, and people's needs have become more diverse.
Google has made its way to more places. From wearables, operating system, moonshot projects, and a lot more. Users are interacting with Google using numerous amount of devices coming from many types, and for that, Google thought that its brand should be able to express the simplicity it always have, with a more delight and opportunities.
Google is becoming the digital infrastructure, it wants to show people that its really keen on it, and its showing that its doing things well.
The design team behind the logo identified four challenges they wanted to address: scalable mark that could convey in more places, the incorporation of dynamic and intelligent motion that respond to users, a systematic approach to branding its products, and a refinement of what Google already has.
The answer to all those challenges, and to also represent itself into what it has become, Google created the new logo.
New Beginning
"So why are we doing this now? Once upon a time, Google was one destination that you reached from one device: a desktop PC," wrote Google's VP of Product Management Tamar Yehoshua and Director of User Experience Bobby Nath, on the company's blog post. "These days, people interact with Google products across many different platforms, apps and devices - sometimes all in a single day."
The most noticeable change in the logo throughout its history is its typeface. Google uses wordmark logo type, and along the way, the company has tweaked letter spacing and removed the drop shadow, as well as making the exclamation mark came and went.
The Google logo is, was, and always simple, friendly and approachable. The team behind the design wanted to keep these qualities, and create a new logotype based on a custom geometric typeface and the already known multi-colored playfulness.
The new logo is pretty much similar to the old one. Using the same four basic colors, the colors are brightened a bit to make it stand out better. The logo is then updated with a custom Sans-Serif typeface the company called Product Sans. The letters are more streamlined and can shrink and expand with more legibility than the former logo that used ornamental Serif.
The logo should look good on a small screen smartwatch, to a screen as large as a home cinema.
Google also created an abridged "G" logo to fit in smaller places. The letter that represents Google as a whole is also rendered in four colors, has increased its visual weight to stand up at small sizes and context where it needs o share space with other elements.
New Life
A logo once was meant to be static, showing itself as it is in all places. The bigger update in its logo is that Google is making it animated, no longer a static wordmark a logo was once known for.
Like many other brands, they've shifted the static paper-first logo into a dynamic logo that is only possible on screens. The logo when called to action, changes its letters and transform into a series of four dots that morph and orbit.
The dots themselves respond to actions. Like for example, when a user uses voice search, the dots becomes an equalizer that react to the user's voice. After that, the dots will spin as Google search for results. And when the results are shown, the dots become a whole "Google" logo again.
A full range of Google's logo expressions were developed including listening, thinking, replying, incomprehension, and confirmation.
Beside that just making a beauty out of its logo design, what Google wants is interaction which respond to behavior. Each animation serves as a prompt, saying that Google is indeed flexible, and most importantly, very much Google.
New Identity
Google started its life as a search engine. As popular as it can be, it widened its wings to many more places that works for consumers, including mobile phones, TV, watch, apps, driverless car, moonshot projects, to desktop.
The logo is telling the brand's whole new story by introducing its new "identity family".
With the many ability of logo animations, Google can create visuals that show and respond differently across actions, apps or tools.
"As you'll see, we've taken the Google logo and branding, which were originally built for a single desktop browser page, and updated them for a world of seamless computing across an endless number of devices and different kinds of inputs (such as tap, type and talk)," wrote Google.
"We think we've taken the best of Google (simple, uncluttered, colorful, friendly)," wrote Google, "and recast it not just for the Google of today, but for the Google of the future."
Introducing a new logo is nothing new to Google. And just like any other design that is just unveiled, the new logo has been hated by some, saying it to be making Google more like a kid's product, while others praised it by saying it to be highlighting Google's massive diversity of products and services.