I love it. Quite often logo redesign processes gets completely out of hand, but this was a significant improvement over the older version: Cleaner, more modern and beautiful in all its simplicity. Bravo!
Non est disputandum I guess.
However I think the colour blocking and letter shaping on the new favicon is superb.
Most design problems are this way. Even after you fix them they are often not obvious to the user despite improving the UX.
I view Heineken as a boring lager which has little character, probably due to being produced in industrial quantities. A jaunty 'e' isn't going to fix that.
Same for google. So long as they continue to bang out appropriate search results I'm with them. Right until they don't.
That tilted 'e' is meant to advertise the brand in the middle of dozens of other logos in the store, and draw consumers in from that myriad of choices based on psychological cues and associations they may not even be aware of. The effect is important in aggregate - some large number of potential customers conditioned over a lifetime of advertising to associate different typographic styles with emotional states and narratives being slightly more conducive to pick your beer over others than they otherwise might have been, because now it's 'nicer.'
Objective support for this hypothesis is thin on the ground.
In reality logos are nowhere near the top of the list of factors that drive a buying decision. Whatever bounce effect businesses get from a new logo can usually be explained just as much by novelty as by implied psychological voodoo.
Generally, I'm suspicious of management-by-logo. When I see logos being updated at vast expense for no good reason, I worry about the direction a company is heading in.
And everybody else in the world.
> In reality logos are nowhere near the top of the list of factors that drive a buying decision.
Great. Then replace the Chanel or Louis Vuitton logos with a bright primary colored Google logo, and see what their purse sales are like a year from now. I'm sure millionaire socialite women would love to have their bright red-blue-green-yellow logos on their Saint Laurent jacket (although it would be perfect for Moschino...)
Sorry dude, but you're over thinking this. Logos are part and parcel to brand identity, and everything about branding determines sales.
If you don't have a good logo, you don't have a good business.
Google's search engine has a separate function that stands on it's own two feet irrespective of a change to an 'e'.
> If you don't have a good logo you don't have a good business
Come on my good man, get a grip!
Some do. The vast majority of designer clothes don't.
People buy the brand, not the product.
> Google's search engine has a separate function that stands on it's own two feet irrespective of a change to an 'e'.
People bought into the Google brand identity. They were the first to eliminate all the crap around their web search engine, so it would just be a single text box. This made sure people know what Google was - the simple search interface. All of this is part of the brand's visual identity.
Do you think they do an empirical study on this when they first made it?
It is your brand that sells your product.
The shape of the letter 'e' is part of that marketing that sells your product.
In fact, EVERYTHING you do is fundamentally related to sales. You are always closing.
This is backwards - the product sells the brand. Brands do not just come out of nowhere; people have to like the product first before they can establish loyalty.
crappySearch(searchTerm.remove("Jeeves how do I"));
Catull³, the font on which the former Google wordmark was based (it's not exactly Catull — some details are simplified, like the serif edges being snapped to 45°), is actually closer to the script than to typical Venetian typefaces — which, once you've seen the whole thing, blows the idea of the old logo looking ‘more professional’ out of the water, unless your profession is ‘medieval scribe’.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox-ATypI_classification#Human...
I agree ... but this is just the price for showing up at this level of the game. It is of course a major effort for those professionals who executed on it, and is beyond my capabilities - but it's not strategic level stuff - just like stealth fighters are not strategic level stuff anymore.
(My previous and clearly downvote-magnet post that is a little more detailed):
An updated, simple look and feel is not a matter for congratulations. Look at stealth airplanes. If you don't have a stealth warplane, the modern SAMs can take you out no problem, with stealth the odds are much more in your favour. Stealth tech is the table stakes, the price any superpower or superpower-to-be must pay just to show up.
If Google had not done this, or had done it badly, then we would worry. Behind the scenes many many professionals worked hard to make sure it went well - as expected.
This is something I personally would never achieve - I could not steer a multi-national rebranding. But Google has to - it's the price just for staying in the game.
So kudos to those involved, it took years of your experience and effort. But for Google, it's just what needed to be done to keep up. And if we should not be distracted, internally they really must not be distracted.