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Comment by mahouse | Hacker News Reader

I'll be the first one to say it: I liked the older better. There was literally nothing wrong with it, it did not look dated at all.

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They actually give a reason why they changed it in the blog post. Saying that the old one was designed for desktops and the new one is meant to scale better (for things like watches and phones I'd guess).

Edit: to add from their design blog[0], the new logo can be sent to a client in 305 bytes of compressed SVG (vs 14,000 bytes for the old logo). So it helps with lower bandwidth. The design post also mentions scaling of the logo.

[0] https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident...

Yes, anytime there is a logo change there is a bunch of marketing talk about why. It's all bullshit. At the end of the day it was because someone wanted to make their mark and got a chance to do it. A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota.

And it will be slightly changed in another couple of years by some new VP who wants to shake things up and get that next promotion.

Yes, I always think it's the designer equivalent of the programmers who always blame pre-existing codebases no matter what, until they refactor it the way they like.

> Yes, anytime there is a logo change there is a bunch of marketing talk about why. It's all bullshit.

You refute that the old logo didn't scale down to smaller screens well? Getting the logo visible across mobile devices was a major part of the redesign. If your job is logos and branding, that seems like a real problem. And branding does affect a company's outcome, certainly more than "one iota". You are acting like a terrible cynic and troll.

>"It's all bullshit. At the end of the day it was because someone wanted to make their mark"

Anything them there MBA-types do is bullshit, am I right? In fact, I have no idea why Google doesn't run from the command line only!

I'm sure glad to have HN around to tell me how most of the machinations of a large global corporation are pointless.

By the way, do you have one shred of evidence that this was a VP looking to get promoted?

No, MBAs do a lot of important things and I have no idea if anyone involved in the post has an MBA. The language used in this post uses a lot of words to explain nothing. It's basic corporate bullshit. MBAs are good at it, but by no means are they the only shovelers.

When I was younger I didn't use Yahoo! because I disliked their logo and the use of ! in their name.

Petty? Yes. Did it effect their market share? By at least 1 - yes.

I highly doubt I was the only one to act like that. Design matters. Even if you don't think it does.

For those wondering, I also didn't enjoy listening to Panic! At the Disco. They also eventually dropped the !.

I guess I shouldn't ask if you're a Godspeed You! Black Emperor fan...

> A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota.

Ah, but it will. When you're a company like Google, with hundreds of millions of users a day, it's only a matter of time that something like an outdated logo will start to lose you customers. People make sub-conscious inferences about your product based on appearance. If you start looking like that thing everyone used to use, they'll start looking for alternatives.

Google's logo is so important to keeping users around that they frequently replace it with a silly animation about a current event.

This redesign was for Google executives, not Google users.

Was about to make the same point.

Is that your gut instinct or is there research to suggest that that's the case?

My personal process for using Google (not saying everyone is the same, but...) goes something like this:

1. Type "g" into the address bar

2. Press enter, because www.google.com auto-populates at that point

3. Start typing my query while the animation of the day is loading

4. Press enter

5. Review the results

Why not just run the search straight from your browser's address bar or search field?

Because, for good reason, not everyone has that set to Google?

At least in Firefox, you can search multiple providers from the search bar. I believe other browsers can do this as well.

I could, but it's more of a force of habit- but if I did that would further prove my point that the choice of logo doesn't make any difference to people using the site for search.

> They actually give a reason why they changed it in the blog post.

This was the part where I literally thought "How do they come up with this bullshit?".

It doesn't sound genuine at all.

We've been using the new logo internally for a week. Give it a day, and then go back and look at the old logo, and then tell me how dated it looks.

My series of responses within the span of 30 minutes:

* "It looks like fridge magnets for kids! I don't like it; the iconic lower case g is gone cause of designers obsession of san-serif == modern."

* "Glad that they continue to embrace their playful culture tho."

* "You know what, it's growing on me."

* "Haha, they tilted the e, how cute. Oh god what is happening to me!?"

* "Geeze, how old is Google books? They haven't even updated the logo!"

Nailed it.

..."Now, what did the old logo look like!?!"

Same here. Amazingly, the first inflection point was after about 60 seconds of pure disgust.

Not into that G yet. I think I'll call them oogle from now on.

nah, i still prefer the old one. I've been looking at the new one for a week and I don't see it as better or worse. Just different.

what other secrets from the future can you share with us since you are privileged to live inside the source of all knowledge?

I'm not sure if you're using the same definition of "dated." Of course, once the logo has been changed, the old one is objectively dated, in the sense that it has been discontinued as of some previous date. I think the other commenter was claiming that, on its own, the previous logo did not look like it was an old logo only appropriate for a previous era.

(a) It still shows the old logo on Google.de

(b) The new one looks overly simplistic – and too geometric. It ignores the lessons typographs have learnt in centuries. Usually, you want glyphs that look balanced – the new logo does not look balanced.

Actual honest question: what does it mean to "use a logo for a week"? I don't understand what I would do to "give it a day," unless you just mean wait and see how I feel tomorrow.

Uncharitably, I'd say the old logo looked much more professional, and so didn't jive with Google's corporate ethos of "seem as much like a preschool as humanly possible". The new one definitely fits better in that respect.

When you're collecting the world's data, it's in your best interest to come off as cuddly as possible. It works.

I agree--there's something--I don't know, "disposable" or "fadish" or "bland" about the feel of the new one. It seems to have lost personality.

> There was literally nothing wrong with it, it did not look dated at all.

It definitely didn't look dated. That's because no other tech company in the world imitated Google's choice to use a font inspired by 15th century typography that literally looks like it was created with a calligraphy brush.

Yahoo just redesigned their logo to look more like calligraphy.

You mean engraved stone.

My initial reaction is that I like the old one better for now, on my desktop, in a static sense.

But the new one is nice, and the functionality behind it from scaling to leading the users through task-flows just makes too much sense.

And like the shift on iOS, I probably won't like the aesthetics of the old design compared to the new in a few days anyway.

It's design. It'll change even when it doesn't need to, almost by definition.

Wow, that's an uncharitable opinion of design and designers. They're highly-trained professionals too, and redesigns like this aren't done just for the heck of it -- according to the blog post, this measurably increases performance on small screens and in low-bandwidth contexts.

Being able to do everything with SVGs is admittedly nice. But if Google was worried about performance on small screens and in low-bandwidth contexts, we wouldn't have Material design, as it's animations have quite a bloated effect on performance. Particularly on devices with low power/low processing. Page loads on desktops for some Google sites are up to ten seconds now.

But yes, most redesigns are done just for the heck of it. I have a pretty uncharitable opinion of design and designers too, if only because very few Silicon Valley designers seem to have any idea how the users experience (and hate) their work. (I remember back when I heard about Google doing heavy testing with normal users before making changes, and it's very clear that that stopped when Duarte stepped in.)

> But if Google was worried about performance on small screens and in low-bandwidth contexts, we wouldn't have Material design, as it's animations have quite a bloated effect on performance. Particularly on devices with low power/low processing. Page loads on desktops for some Google sites are up to ten seconds now.

Poorly performing animations do not work that way.

There's Material Design Light, which seems to work pretty well for low-performing browsers: http://www.getmdl.io/index.html

Doesn’t help with Google Maps, or Inbox, which take ages (literally, sometimes half a minute) to load and still lagg forever.

You're about as far from a definition for design as one could be.

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