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New Google Favicon Deja Vu All Over Again?
theodp writes "Last June, Google rolled out a new favicon, the small branding icon that graces your URL bar when you visit Google. Which, as it turned out, bore a striking similarity to Garth Brooks' Circle-G logo. Well, Google went back to the drawing board and has come back with a new favicon, which it says was inspired by — not copied from, mind you — its users' submitted ideas. Some are also seeing inspiration elsewhere for the new favicon, which consists of white 'g' on a background of four color swatches. Take the AVG antivirus icon, for instance. Or everybody's favorite memory toy, Simon. Or — in perhaps the unkindest cut of all — the four-color Microsoft Windows logo, shown here with a superimposed white '7'. Anything else come to mind?" What comes to mind for me is just how obsessed many people are with the Google favicon.
Even after reading the article it took me a long time to see the 'g' in there.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
I had no idea there was a lowercase "g" in it until I read the article here.
For the sake of another data point (since there's those other people agreeing with you), I saw a G immediately. And I'm a pathologically unobservant person :|
If by a direct copy, you mean both have the letter g, then yes. yes you are right.
Andre Resende got it right in the first place.
>Clearly the lack of keen insights such as yours
...but you're right, they are clearly beyond saving in this area. :-)
s/insights/experience
>hugely successful juggernaut of a company
Uhh, yeah. You mean a very rich, successful company. And a company that is going to have one jacked up corporate culture in 15-20 years. We're still waiting to see how that part's going to develop. These companies get so big so fast, full of so much hot air, that we end up paying a creativity tax years down the road as they raise service fees to pay for all the middle managers who got in while the getting was good.
Sure, right now they're a big successful company with a lot of engineering divas and XKCD readers who think that they can literally do anything they want in life, and every door is open to them.
From my experience, immature corporate policy just feeds this crap. Individual personalities will differ; I'm sure there are some fantastic people there. But I'm talking not about money, or about individuals. I'm talking about the company's personality. How deluded it is. How many people are going to get cut once the hubris levels come down a bit. How long they can do no evil when they can't even publish guidelines for duplicating a graphic logo (that I've been able to find...)
>Maybe you should stick to lecturing the indecisive hippies in your class.
Yeah, sure. And you stick to heckling the lecturers of said hippies.~
It is my opinion that the favicons for a site are very important for recognition (e.g. for completion in the URL bar) for the average user.
Favicons are not necessarily tiny actually. Konqueror has the feature (that I like very much) to set the favicon as the application icon. That has the nice effect that in your pager (the virtual desktop manager in the ) the window area is filled with the favicon. Very nice for switching desktops to the right browser window.
Thirdly, I use http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/27548
It helped me to completely block out that google changed their favicon to an ugly one I can't associate with their website and I can live in my tiny world where they didn't.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
There is also a firefox addon which lets you pick your own favicons. I've got my whole bar filled with every site i'll ever need that way. :D
Actually, you have 256^256 possibilities. Think of the 16x16 icon as a continuous row of 256 pixels instead, each with 256 possible colours. That's significantly more than 65536 icons.
Also, why are RGBY Google's colors?
I have absolutely no idea.
Learn to count. There are 256^(16*16) different icons.
Yeah, the user submitted one looks much better than this offset g.
The name is Favicon Picker. It is a great add-on indeed.