Slashdot Mirror
Google Changes Logo
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday, Google announced a logo change that many on Slashdot have probably already encountered. The logo, according to the technology supergiant, was updated to reflect the fact that people "interact with Google products across many different platforms, apps and devices—sometimes all in a single day." This differentiates from the past when people only used a desktop PC to access Google's services.
I looked at Google last night and fell off my chair when I saw a differnet, yet oddly familiar, logo. Many dozens of other news outfits were reporting on it, but I waited until I saw the story on Slashdot to confirm it.
Slashdot is to logo confirmation as Netcraft is to BSD's death confirmation.
Trolling is a art,
Google merely changed it's font. Whoop-de-doo.
This raises the important question of whether the comma in that slogan means "and" or "or". Discuss.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I have opinions about the subject and i still think it's not worth a Slashdot story.
Opinions:
Aesthetically the new logo looks okay. Of course the old logo looked okay too, and as someone who's usually not enthusiastic about change for change's sake i really don't see the point.
However, it is also clearly meant to reference the new "flat" "Material Design" that Google has been pushing in their apps and OS. So even though the logo itself looks okay it still makes me grit my teeth a little because of all the other UI changes they've forced on us that make my eyes bleed.
But what really bugs me is that they changed the favicon to match the new logo. I have a habit of doing a google search, opening a couple of the results in new tabs, looking at them, and then jumping back to the google tab to either open some more results or refine the search. So now by habit my brain is looking for the old favicon in the tabs and keeps skipping over the new (and arguably less distinct) favicon. This is a problem that i'm sure i'll get over relatively soon, but it's going to be annoying for the next couple days.
(See? That totally wasn't worth having a Slashdot story to discuss it.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
No, a major branding change of the internet's arguably most powerful or important company is news.
WHY did they change it? That is news for nerds.
They changed it because serif fonts are hard to read at different resolutions and don't scale well on small devices...like phones and watches.
Non-serif fonts do scale well.
Thus, news for nerds.
This is just marketing bullshit, but I do think it's funny that an article about google's new font uses an image tag that has the old font.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
That's actually not true. Companies often rebrand themselves, not to further get more traction and get more users, but to retain the ones they have. If a company is perceived as being old or stodgy, then people are more likely to gravitate to companies that don't appear that way. This is doubly true in the tech sector.
But more to your point, as the article states, Google is by no means done trying to get more users; it's now all about getting users in developing countries. And making sure their logo looks peachy on a tiny African or Asian cell phone is in fact actually important for branding.