Tech giant Google topped its recent restructuring into Alphabet Inc with a new logo mirroring that of the new umbrella company. The logo, announced, switches to a sans-serif typeface the tailor-made Product Sans for the first time in the company’s history, as well as softening the colour palette. It is the first major change to their logo in sixteen years. The announcement was made, in part, through a “Google Doodle” for which their search engine is famous.
So why did Google decide to make the change? In a blog post, Google discusses how much technology has changed how we interact with its products and with the internet at large. It doesn't really settle on a specific reason that a redesign was needed, but it says that this logo should better reflect the reality that Google is no longer a site you visit on a desktop computer — it's a huge collection of sites, apps, and services that you visit on PCs, Chromebooks, smartphones, and anywhere you can find a web browser. Google writes that its new logo is meant to reflect "this reality and [show] you when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens."
Google says that it's made a version of its logo that's "only 305 bytes, compared to existing logo at 14,000 bytes.
In 1998, Sergey Brin created a computerized version of the Google letters using the free graphics program GIMP. The typeface was changed and an exclamation mark was added, mimicking the Yahoo! logo.
"There were a lot of different color iterations", says Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo. "We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules."
In 2010, the Google logo received its first major overhaul since May 31, 1999. The new logo was first previewed on November 8, 2009 and was officially launched on May 6, 2010. It utilises an identical typeface to the previous logo, but the "o" is distinctly more orange-colored in place of the previously more yellowish "o", as well as a much more subtle shadow rendered in a different shading style. On September 19, 2013, Google introduced a new "flat" (two-dimensional) logo with a slightly altered color palette. On May 24, 2014 the Google logo was updated, the second 'g' has moved right one pixel and the 'l' has moved down and right one pixel. The old 2010 Google logo remained in use on some pages, such as the Google Doodles page, for a period of time.
