The new logo, announced yesterday, is undoubtedly more pleasant and contemporary than the old one. Margaret Rhodes writes that the company wants you to think that it is your go-everywhere friend.
Google needs to be able to transform its brand at will, because its canon of products is expanding rapidly. It's not just that users now engage with the company on a "constellation of devices," as the authors of the logo announcement page put it. As we saw at the I/O developer conference, Google is pushing to seamlessly guide users from one product to the next, with things like Google Now on Tap and voice search as the connective tissue that will bring it all together. For that to work, Google needs a crisp visual system. The new design helps, Clinton says, because the typeface is based largely on circles.
Glenn Fleishman writes that these simple scalable logos are simply bland.
At first glance, it seemed exceedingly bland to me; the longer I look at it and a new font that's related, the more I think they made a series of good choices. It's still bland, but it's a well-thought-out bland that makes sense for their company.
