Cocaine Falling From the Sky
Armin Vit on Google’s new logo:
So… THE logo. If the plan is to signal revolution instead of evolution, where do you go from a serif logo? A sans serif, of course. This is not revolutionary on its own and even less so in these last two years when every other major company is switching to some interpretation of the same style of sans serif. There is nothing special about the new logo. Even the tilted “e” is a tried and true mechanism. In essence, yes, the new logo is boring but it’s not like the old logo was a party with cocaine falling from the sky and male and female strippers grinding on everyone’s groin while Jay Z performed a secret concert. What’s important is that the new logo is exactly right and perfectly calibrated for what it needs to do. It retains the color system that has far too much equity, it keeps a sense of quirkiness through the “e”, and it reads perfectly clear at every single size — perhaps to a fault. As I was working last night on a couple of Google Sheets I couldn’t help but be distracted by the highly visible new logo.
Any other solution to the logo — anything more effusive, more visible, more different, more visually explosive — would have been met with terrible anger. This “boring” solution is safe and almost expected but it’s extremely appropriate.
I appreciate the the thought that went into the overall system—workmark, animation, lettermark—more than I dislike the new workmark.
