How Google's new Logo is just 305 bytes | Hacker News Reader

How Google's new Logo is just 305 bytes

quora.com

75 pointsnksonfire27 comments

This entire blogpost has sadly been plagiarized from a post by a different author here : http://www.quora.com/How-could-Googles-new-logo-be-only-305-...

Without even a link to or mention of the original source.

Yeah, I posted a comment on this bozo's article but I do not think it will go past the "approval" part...

Thanks. We've changed the URL to that from http://www.top5techs.com/2015/09/how-googles-new-logo-is-jus... and banned that site. I wish we had seen this sooner.

"How an Unvailable Simplified Version of Google's new Logo Could be 305 bytes."

Clearly, though, this is not how Google did it. For example, their blog post, https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident... , states that the upper case G is not just a circle, but slightly modified to make it more visually appealing.

Real reason for the redesign. Works for every screen. Loads fast. Aesthetic component is important but not so important. This is a real marriage of art and science for logos.

Shame it looks infantile

agreed

"Aesthetic component is important but not so important".

I wonder how this philosophy will hold up as the years drip by?

> While Google hasn't released the optimized 305 byte logo and it doesn't seem to be available online, I believe that they got the size down to 305 bytes as they claim.

Where do Google claim it is 305 bytes? There's no link provided. AFAICT there's no references in this article.

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

It's in this blog post (search for 305): https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident...

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

Yeah it looks like the original article that this blog post ripped off included the link, the spammer just copied the text.

This reminds me of Paul Prescod's article from 2003 which specifically used Google's landing page as an example of performance improvements that could be obtained by a judicious use of SVG:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/svg-prescod.html

It's quite interesting to see how the new logo can be deconstructed to simple shapes.

That said, shouldn't the link be directly to the article instead of through a URL shortener?

His final "G" is pretty different from both of Google's new G's.

Well, he does mention that Google hasn't yet released its 305 byte variant of the logo, so we don't really have anything to compare it to yet...

I meant it differs visually. I suppose it's possible Google has a different looking G for a compressed variant, but that would just be even more odd from a branding perspective.

Does the size savings matter in comparison to the effort needed to identify (URL) and download the file? I mean to say, is this purely an exercise in graphics optimization or will Google see practical costs savings?

The savings is for the users who are on extremely low bandwidth systems in markets they are trying to break into. 305 bytes is going to download a lot faster than 14kb, which I believe is what they said their old standard logo was. Even the 2kb svg mentioned in the article would be slower.

Even more important, 305 bytes is only a small part of a packet. Much less chance of a packet needing retransmitted on a low/poor quality connection.

I feel like they took something out of this guy's books: http://bchanx.com/logos-in-pure-css-demo

Interestingly, the current logo I see on www.google.com is a 14K PNG (the previous one [from archive.org] was 8K, but lower resolution).

(What's this weird 9m.no redirect?)

original link: http://www.top5techs.com/2015/09/how-googles-new-logo-is-jus...

I'm surprised it's still being used (and a mod fixed the link now), but if you're curious, here's the discussion on 9m.no from 15 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7783239 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com