Google New Logo: 8 Factors Which Influenced Google’s Biggest Branding Update In Last 17 Years

Google has updated their logo, which is being hailed as their biggest branding related update in the last 17 years of their existence. The new logo sports a sans-serif typeface, but is still a wordmark with the same set of colors.

This new logo looks more simple, colorful, uncluttered and is animated. Keeping in mind the usage of mobile and non-desktop gadgets to access the web, this new Google logo is responsive in design and looks more playful and certainly lot more modern.

In their official blogpost, Tamar Yehoshua, VP, Product Management & Bobby Nath, Director of User Experience from Google said, “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).”

Here is a short video, depicting the evolution of Google logo in the last 17 years.

This is the second biggest update coming from Google in the last one month. Last month, Google had restructured their company under a new parent company called Alphabet. If observed closely, this new logo from Google closely resembles the logo of Alphabet as well.

So, what exactly influenced their decision to alter their logo?

In a separate blog post, Google design team explained the rationale behind such a massive branding change; and here are the 8 factors which determined this leap:

8 Factors that Influenced the New Google Branding

Logotype:

This new logotype combines the ‘mathematical purity of geometric forms’, and incubates a custom, geometric sans-serif typeface. The multi-colored wordmark maintains the playfulness of the brand, meanwhile the rotated ‘e’ from the previous designs reminds us that the company is certainly unconventional!

Google G Reconstructed:

The G from Google is now visually heavy with lot more colors, and have been designed to look consistent across any device with any pixel size. This G has been designed on the same grid as their product iconography; however, the circular shape has been optically refined.

Google dots in Motion:

For the first time, Google has placed an animated logo, which proves that Google is dynamic, and is always working for their users. As per Google, these are the ‘unique, magic moments’, depicted in the animation. The ‘expressions’ which this animation depicts have been implemented after conducting indepth research into the listening, thinking, replying, incomprehension, and confirmation abilities of human being (or an average Google user). If observed closely, these dots move in consistent paths and timing, along with a perfect geometric path.

Color:

The vibrancy of red, yellow and green were adjusted to maintain saturation and pop. In case of the letter G, the colors optically blend and thus either darkens or dims as per the device on which its viewed.

Typography:

Google design team created a custom, geometric sans-serif typeface which they call as ‘Product Sans’. This new typeface has a complete character set which includes numerals, punctuation, accent and alternate characters, fractions, symbols, and supports extended Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic.

Products

Although Google would be implementing this change across their various products, but the Search remains their #1 priority. Hence, Search UX and Engineering teams implemented the first change across text and voice based queries. An appropriate level of distinction is maintained between Google’s main logotype and the logos of their various products such as Chrome, Gmail and Drive.

Broader Distribution:

In order to satisfy the color, size and background requirements of the logo when viewed across various devices, Google generated thousands of vector based variants of this new logo. Hence, a unique approach for asset generation, version control, and self-service distribution was implemented here. The team ensured that the design pixels remain consistent for size and latency, wherever they are used: desktop, mobile, tablets or phablets. Although the actual logo is sized somewhere around 14,000 bytes, a new variant was developed having size of only 305 bytes, which will work even in low bandwidth connections.

Beyond Design:

Not only the design team, but every employee of Google has contributed to the evolution of the logo in one way or the other. If last year they introduced ‘Material Design’ to help designers and developers embrace the ever expanding multi-device, multi-screen world, then this year, its their new logo with some in-depth research and analysis.

Here is the full blog written by Alex Cook, Jonathan Jarvis and Jonathan Lee with some more exciting details about the considerations which went behind the new Google logo.

Do share your feedback and observations pertaining to the new Google logo by commenting right here!