One suspects that the sale and supply of josticks and whalesong CD's around Google secret evil genius hideout HQ spiked during this, erm, exercise.
Earth wobbles on axis as Google rebrands
Paradigms were shifted and the Earth possibly wobbled a little on its axis yesterday as Google announced a new logo to brand its continuing drive towards total world domination. According to a blog post, the revamp includes a fresh face and an "identity family", all suitable for deployment across the bewildering and exciting …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 12:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
"It's so bad. Like someone's kid wrote Google with fridge magnets."
It seems to be the way of things. Skeuomorphism out the window along with anything that took someone with a modicum of talent more than 5 minutes to knock up. Look at the Win8/10 GUI, recent iOS home screens, latest OS/X dock etc.
I'm not really sure what this whole Back To The 90s look is in aid of. Perhaps its just millenial designers being faux-ironic or maybe some misplaced nostalgia for a simpler look. Thats fine, but when the simpler look actually turns out to be a shit look its time to think again.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 18:29 GMT Atrophic Cerebrum
It doesn't bother me that much, what does is the backlash against Skeudomorphism as a design rationale.
For instance, the google earth icon should just be a real time image of what the product/service is, it'd look far better than some strange representation of the planet, you'd get a real time image of the earth complete with terminator to roughly know what time it is. If the user needs it to use less bandwidth then limit the realtime Skeudomorphic representation to update only over a wi-fi connection. For me that would be a good design and create a strong connection between icon and product.
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Friday 4th September 2015 00:05 GMT Michael Wojcik
the backlash against Skeudomorphism
There's no "d" in "skeuomorphism".
the google earth icon should just be a real time image of what the product/service is, it'd look far better than some strange representation of the planet, you'd get a real time image of the earth complete with terminator to roughly know what time it is
Do you mean "a (soft) real-time image of a projection of a hemisphere of the earth"? And presumably that hemisphere would include one of the terminators. A bit under-specified, if you ask me. And, frankly, I don't see the benefit.
In any event, though, it's hard to see how your proposal is more skeuomorphic than "some strange representation of the planet", unless the latter is very abstract indeed. It'd be more skeuomorphic than an icon which has nothing to do with the planet. Skeuomorphism just means the design is derived from an original referent that isn't present.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 12:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sans serif
"The new logos will work legibly on extremely tiny screens like wearables and IoT (and as a logo on them)"
No offence, but who the f**k cares what a logo looks like on tiny screens? If the screen is that small you're not going to be able to read any search results text anyway.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 12:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sans serif
>> who the f**k cares what a logo looks like on tiny screens?
marketing people do.
who the f**k did you think decided new logos were needed?
>> If the screen is that small you're not going to be able to read any search results
how old fashioned, like this is just about search results.
that little multicoloured G for example, in 10 years they'll hope that'll be a small and subtle but recognisable round lozenge on 10 million IOT devices all over the world.
I love this idea of people moaning it's too simple and it could've been done by a child as if that is the defining factor as to whether a brand or logo is good or not.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 13:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sans serif
"I love this idea of people moaning it's too simple and it could've been done by a child"
The IBM logo looks as if it was knocked out in a couple of minutes. If you look at their website, though, although the serif-with-lines-through logo is still there in the corner, elsewhere IBM appears as a simple sans face with no decoration.
Graphic designers aren't actually clueless. They do tend to know what works.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 15:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sans serif
"Graphic designers aren't actually clueless. They do tend to know what works."
Bollocks. They don't have a clue - they just go with the rest of the herd and hope it works. For a company like google thats a virtual monopoly in certain spaces its irrelevant, but for a smaller company a childish logo could be the kiss of death. Unless of course its for a nursery or similar.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 15:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sans serif
"who the f**k did you think decided new logos were needed?"
People who saw a bunch of loaded suckers a mile off.
"how old fashioned, like this is just about search results."
Currently thats where google gets the vast majority of its income from. So it might be old fashioned, but its also current reality.
"that little multicoloured G for example, in 10 years they'll hope that'll be a small and subtle but recognisable round lozenge on 10 million IOT devices all over the world."
We'll see. I won't hold my breath.
"I love this idea of people moaning it's too simple and it could've been done by a child as if that is the defining factor as to whether a brand or logo is good or not."
Generally it is. Its only marketing types who don't realise it.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 13:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sans serif
"Sure, something designed to be displayed on 640x480 screens at 72ppi is really not adequate for today "low resolution" displays well over 200ppi"
Missing the point. It isn't about the dpi but the size at which the text is legible. You may be able to read 4.7pt serif faces but a lot of people can't (which is why they are popular for the small print in prospectuses...). The old Google light face will start to disappear far sooner than the new one. Google's explanation about desktop versus small devices is perfectly reasonable.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 14:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sans serif
At 200 and more ppi, you have enough pixels to display well serif faces at the same "physical" dimensions which in the past with far lower ppi would display ugly.
Designers are fashion-driven people, today sans-serif fonts are cool, tomorrow maybe not... maybe one day a Comic Sans logo will be cool...
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 22:00 GMT Captain DaFt
Re: Sans serif
"Sure, something designed to be displayed on 640x480 screens at 72ppi is really not adequate for today "low resolution" displays well over 200ppi..."
It's a matter of scale. Those old 640x480 screens were normally 13 inch diagonal, the new screens (Up to 4K now!) are as small as 5.5" and even still many at 3.5" on feature phones.
Lay in a supply of sugar cubes to train the pissants to read your phone for you.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 11:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
I vaguely remember another recent redesign
I vaguely remember another recent redesign of a very important website that was equally poorly received as a completely unpositive step forward for both design and usability. Definitely a new identity family, a paradigm shift.
Back then, the redesign certainly strongly registered with me in a negative manner; but time has moved on and I'm fine now. Perhaps the same will happen with Google v2.0?
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 22:07 GMT Captain DaFt
Re: I vaguely remember another recent redesign
"Back then, the redesign certainly strongly registered with me in a negative manner; but time has moved on and I'm fine now."
I'm happy you adjusted. It drove me to almost exclusively view the mobile site, which needed a bit of help from plug-ins to render palatable.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 13:10 GMT Paul Kinsler
Re: Yet another serif logo goes the way of all print
Well, it has been nearly a century since the notion of "modern" embraced, amongst other things, an enthusiasm for sans serif fonts. It's nice that Google have finally got around to catching up, although maybe they should also lose the upper case G if they really want to get with the program.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 12:39 GMT Joseph Haig
All these comments ...
... because no company has ever rebranded before.
Maybe the comments section on this type of article should come ready populated with posts saying:
1) How much did that cost them?
2) I preferred the old one.
3) Most people probably didn't notice.
4) Obviously a publicity stunt.
5) Who cares?
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 14:03 GMT J.G.Harston
So, they've swapped Times for Ariel
yawn.
Well, actually, with more use of small-screen devices, non-serifed less-rounded fonts are easier to read. A couple of years back the Beeb de-italicised their logo as upright lettering is crisper on the more common smaller displays people are using.
Edit: just noticed somebody else posted exactly the same point while I was typing.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 14:33 GMT DropBear
To be fair though...
...the Earth is always wobbling in its orbit, thanks to the often overlooked fact that the Moon doesn't actually orbit Earth, rather they orbit each other around their common barycenter - which just happens to be about 1/4 of Earth radius under the surface of the Earth, causing it to waltz around the Sun in a somewhat wobbly fashion (I swear the wobble is readily detectable, but for some weird reason only on Friday afternoons...)
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Wednesday 9th September 2015 00:38 GMT Mike Flugennock
Re: To be fair though...
Point well taken. I also had this pointed out to me in my junior high school astronomy class. Still, as the Earth/Moon system's barycenter is within the Earth, most regular folks are good with the idea of the Moon "orbiting" the Earth.
Now, if you want a really good example of a "wobbly" system, check out some of the time lapses of Pluto and Charon taken by New Horizons on approach prior to the flyby. The barycenter of the Pluto/Charon system is well outside Pluto, and Pluto can be seen visibly wobbling in space as Charon tugs at it as they orbit their common barycenter much in the manner of a binary star.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 17:34 GMT j7n
The elegant logo in Giovanni font looked legible enough on 1024*768 shadow mask screens in 1999-2000. Nobody asked for a paragraph of body text set that type and color to be read. If devices with an even lower resolution screen than that exist today, which I doubt, Google could serve a simplified logo exclusively to them, perhaps in formatted HTML, and no pictures at all. Problem solved.
The earth did kinda wobble, because I heard about the logo on the World Service yesterday. I didn't pay any attention to yet another "doodle" on the corner of the search results page.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2015 19:46 GMT Nelbert Noggins
It's obvious why this has happened now. As a subsidiary of Alphabet it was time for a new logo, brand, image, business cards and expensive lunch discussing the whale and joss-stick budget just so it's clear to people they're a new company and not just a paperwork/legal/tax re-jig of the same old monster