Google rolled out its new logo on September 1, marking an end to the long reign of the serif font. The rest of the internet, of course, can’t decide how it feels about the sudden change.
Many news outlets have praised the change, which appeared in a Google Doodle on the main page. The animation showed a small hand erasing the logo and drawing it again in a piece of chalk yet still keeping the same colorful letters the company is known for.
Slate, for instance, said that the new logo was “perfect” for the company, which owns about 65 to 70% of the search engine market share worldwide.
Slate writer Derreck Johnson called the logo “a little more fun, bold, and, most importantly, ‘now.'”
Gizmodo blogger Alyssa Walker quipped that the “serifs had it coming,” and she explained just how lousy the serifs were as Google’s logo evolved. Although Google has been able get rid of the puffy text and beveled edges of the old days, Walker said that designers were stuck once they gave the company logo a more flat appearance.
The old designs also didn’t scale well, Walker said, naming the “half-g” in the Google Plus logo as a prime example of Google’s logo problems. Therefore, she said, going sans serif made sense, especially as more websites optimize their text for smaller screens.
Vox writer Phil Edwards agreed that this was a good move for the company, which is also known for apps such as Google Maps and Gmail, among seemingly countless others.
Edwards pointed out some of the very bad logo prototypes designed by Google founder Sergey Brin, who used open source photo-editing program GIMP to design them. Early logos also included a clip-art turkey as an early Thanksgiving Google Doodle and a stick figure in the logo’s background meant to represent the Burning Man festival.
But not everyone is pleased with the Google logo’s transformation.
The San Diego Union-Tribune rounded up some tweets about the change. While some were nice, others weren’t so welcoming of the new logo.
“Congrats to whoever created the new Google logo in Word on their lunch break,” read one critic.
“Their old logo was goofy. This new one is simply garbage. Just right for a company with no taste,” said another one.
Margaret Rhodes of Wired, however, expressed different concerns about the logo: namely, that the company is trying hard to look “friendly.” In fact, that’s how Google self-described the logo: “simple, friendly, and approachable.”
But Rhodes explained that the world’s largest search engine actually knows more about us than we may know about ourselves, and that’s exactly what a corporation like Google wants us to forget.
“The company wants you to think of it not as an all-knowing, all-powerful entity, but as a benevolent guide to this new world, one that considers humans, not machines, the most important thing,” Rhodes wrote.
