What does the Google logo mean? The secret history of the Google logo Ok google what is engraving

New logo. The new sign can be seen on the main search page, its favicon, in social network Google+ and other services. Look At Me has collected 11 radical and unofficial company logo redesigns that have appeared both before and after the presentation of the new logo.

The company logo has been updated three forms. First, this is the full version with the word “Google”. Second, abbreviated with a capital “G”; it will be used on small screens and where there is no place for a logo (for example, on a favicon). Thirdly, these are dynamic points illustrating communication with a person. Now they are used only in voice search. For example, dots show when Google is listening to a request, parsing it, responding, or not understanding the meaning.

At the time, designers were trying to answer four problems: a scalable logo that has a dynamic identity and a consistent branding approach, and recognizable brand elements should be revisited to reflect new needs.

Two working versions of designers from Google, Claes Källarsson and Eike Drescher

Google believes that the old logo was created only for the desktop version of the search. But over the past 17 years, the company's services have begun to be used on different platforms and devices. “You expect Google to help you where and when you need it: on your smartphone, on your TV, on your watch, on your car dashboard, and yes, even on your desktop,” argue UX Director Bobby Nath and Vice President of Product Management Tamar Yehoshua .

The Product Sans typeface was created for the new logo. The font for letters from school textbooks was taken as a basis. A similar one can be seen, for example, on the website of Alphabet, Google. The font was made for Latin, Cyrillic, Greek alphabet and in two styles. The second - more subtle - will be used for product names (for example, Google Maps).

“The logo has always been done in a simple, friendly and accessible style. We wanted to preserve these qualities by combining the mathematical purity of geometric shapes and the childlike simplicity of textbook letters. The new logo is a geometric sans-serif, multi-coloured playfulness and a twisted “e” from our previous sign as a reminder that we will always be a bit unconventional.”

How designers redesigned the Google logo before and after its redesign

One of the first redesigns of the new logo, Mark Malstrom
Functional logo with a search bar, Dana Kim
An attempt to "Arabize" a sign for the web, Ahmed Genaidy
Logo with a fundamentally new style, Stefano Perrone
An even less obvious option, Kha Meng
Trying to make a big version

Google is an unconventional company. Their mission to make information universally accessible and useful is constantly evolving. Last year, Google introduced Material Design, which was designed to help designers and developers embrace an expanding world in which new devices are constantly appearing. With these thoughts in mind, the company decided to create a new logo that would help make Google more accessible and useful to everyone.

In this article, we'll take a look at some of the design decisions that made Google what it is today.

Joint design

Earlier this year, designers from across the US, including the Creative Lab and Material Design teams, met in New York for an intense, week-long design sprint. They sketched out a brief showing four goals:

A scalable sign that could convey the feel of a full logo in tight spaces.
The introduction of dynamic and intelligent movement that would respond to users at all stages of interaction.
A systematic approach to product branding to prove Google's consistency and meet user expectations.
Highlight what makes Google what it is by combining the best of the brand with what users love and know.

The process began with the distillation of the brand - four colors on a white background. After hundreds of hours of design work, several directions were chosen.

The design team shared their insights with the rest of the company. Engineers, researchers, marketers - they all tested ideas and expressed their opinion. This teamwork has resulted in a system that is flexible enough to be used in all marketing materials and products running on any platform: three elementary components that come together in a single logo.

Elements:

Logo

Sans Serif logo that contains the classic Google color sequence.

points

Dynamic distillation of the logo for interactive, auxiliary and transitional moments.

Letter G

A compact version of the logo that works on a small scale.

Understanding the System

Logo

The Google logo has always had a simple and friendly style. The company wanted to preserve these qualities by combining the mathematical purity of geometric shapes with the childish simplicity of letters in school books. The new logo features a custom geometric Sans Serif font, and features a colorful playfulness and a twisted “e” – a reminder that Google will always be different.

The final logo was tested for a very long time in various sizes and styles for maximum image compatibility on all devices. To achieve results, Google developed standards that cover all aspects of the logo, including letter spacing, cleanliness rules, and other specifications that dictate how the logo should be handled.

Creation of the letter G

The letter itself echoes the G from the logo, but the increased visual weight helps it stand out in small sizes and when it has to share space with other elements. It is created in the same grid as other iconography products. The color proportions correspond to the full range of colors in the logo and are set in a sequence that helps the eye move along the shape of the letter.

points

The dots are dynamic and are a moving version of the logo. They represent Google's intelligence at work and show you when it's working with you. A whole range of expressions has been developed: listening, thought process, response, misunderstanding and confirmation. While these movements appear to be spontaneous, they are based on sequential paths and timing that cause points to move along geometric arcs and follow standard set curves.

Color

The Google logo benefits from spaces between letters, but when the colors are next to each other - as in the case of the letter G - they blend visually and can distort the original meaning. Therefore, the colors were chosen especially carefully.

Typography

Together with the logo, a custom geometric Sans Serif font was created that would match the logo paired with the products and support the identity. Google named this font Product Sans. The font design takes inspiration from the same print style of children's books, but also uses the neutral consistency we all expect to see in geometric fonts. This allows you to link the Google logo and the product name.

Products

Many Google products will release updates, but for many people, the first experience was the search bar. The UX and engineering team worked quite hard to provide text and voice incarnations, showcasing the full range of identity expressions.

Wide use

As design evolves, engineers have developed a unique approach to keep up with new generations, versions, and distribution of services. Using perfect SVGs like basic set, thousands of vector variants were automatically generated to meet the size, color, and background requirements.

This helps to make the design perfect down to every pixel, no matter where it is used. The new logo has become more flexible due to its reduced size, making it easier to manage according to the environment.

Few people do not know Google Corporation. It is one of the giants of the Internet industry. At the word "Google" most immediately imagine a bright and colorful inscription that looks very positive. The logo looks very simple and at the same time is well remembered.

The history of the origin of the Google logo is intertwined with the creation of the name of this Internet company. The developers were educated and quite advanced people, so they decided to create a logo that would emphasize their power. The word Google is a slightly modified English word "googol". It represents the number ten to the hundredth power., that is, in other words, shows the full power of this technological corporation. The Internet public learned about the emergence of a new search engine in 1997 under the name Google. It was also registered Domain name google.com.

This logo began to be developed by one of the leaders of the corporation named Sergey Brin. After some time, not entirely satisfied with the result, he asks for help from Ruth Kedar, who worked in 1999 as a Design Lecturer at Stanford University. It is generally accepted that everyone knows Google logo designed by this lady.

The leaders of the Internet project set a serious task for Ruth. Their company needed a logo that would distinguish their young project from competitors. Several versions of the emblem were created, and a meeting was held at which the winner was chosen. The chosen logo met all the stated rules, namely:

Very simple inscription;

Some airiness and volume of letters;

The font used in the logo is called - Catull (it uses elements of the old style, which is intended to represent the connection of generations, which will help in the search);

Simplicity and playfulness of style;

The original use of color shades without taking into account the rules of the color wheel.

Indeed, this emblem had an inscription without any frills and colorful colors. In addition, it had a symbolic connotation, which showed all the convenience of using this search engine and emphasized the originality of the corporation.

1996: First Google logo

The very first search engine logo actually predates the Google name. Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally named their web crawler BackRub. The choice of such a name was dictated by the fact that the main function of the engine was to search by backlinks (or backlinks, backlinks).

Fortunately, by 1997 they had changed the name of the company to Google, a misspelling of googol (the Latin term for the number 10 to the hundredth power, i.e. one followed by 100 zeros). The idea was that the Google search engine could quickly provide users with great amount, or googol, results.

Some sources credit the creation of the first Google logo to Page, while others say Brin designed it using the free GIMP image editor. Whoever it was, his design wasn't the most refined:

Want another fun fact? The exclamation point was supposedly included in Google's rebrand only because it was on the Yahoo! It would seem that all technology companies followed each other's example.

1999-2010: Ruth Kedar logo designs

A mutual friend introduced Brin and Page to Stanford University professor Ruth Kedar. They asked her to design some logo prototypes for them.

Ruth started with a predominantly black logo and Adobe Garamond font. She also removed the exclamation point from the original version. The badge in the middle looked like a Chinese finger trap:

In the next version, the graphic designer used the Catull font. The logo was intended to evoke a sense of precision, like a target:

The next few iterations looked more like the Google logo we all know and love today. These designs look younger and less serious than their predecessors.

The eighth design was the simplest. Kedar wanted to show the potential of Google to be much more than just a search engine (so she removed the magnifying glass). She also changed the traditional order of the primary colors to emphasize how unconventional Google was:

The final design was one of the most minimalistic. It was the official Google logo from 1999 to 2010.

In 2015, Google designers gathered in New York for a week-long sprint to develop a new logo and branding.

As a result, the logo has changed dramatically. The company retained its distinctive color pattern, but changed the Catull typeface to Product Sans.

At the same time, Google also released several variations of its logo, including a rainbow "G" representing a smartphone app, a favicon for Google sites, and a microphone for voice search.

Despite the apparent simplicity of the new logo, the transformation was significant. Catull - the old typeface - has , short strokes decorating the ends of some letters. Serif fonts are less versatile than sans-serif fonts because the letters vary in weight.

Sans fonts are sans-serif fonts. This means that it is easy for Google developers to adapt the logo to different screen sizes. As it expands product line Google has a growing need for .

The Google logo is also now dynamic. When you launch on your phone or tablet, you see four animated multi-colored dots. As you speak, these dots become an equalizer that responds to your voice. And as soon as you finish talking, the equalizer turns into dots again. In the meantime, Google is looking for you results, these points are pulsating.

Implementation and development of Google Doodle

In 1998, Google began experimenting with the Google Doodle, a temporary modification of the traditional Google logo.

The first Google Doodle appeared in 1998. Page and Sergey attended the Burning Man festival. To let everyone know where they are, they added a symbol for this holiday to the logo:

In 2000, Brin and Sergey invited Dennis Hwang, then a simple trainee, to create a Bastille Day doodle. Users liked him so much that they nicknamed Dennis "the main doodler".

Every day, Google processes approximately 3.5 billion search queries. Therefore, the average person can see the logo of this network from 1 to 30 times a day. In the two decades that Google has existed, this very logo has been iconic and easily recognizable. But in all its evolutions it has remained deceptively simple.

By the way, Google had two so-called “first logos”. In 1996, the logo was an image of a hand with red font, and the original name of the company was BackRub.

After the 1998 rebrand, the name Google appeared, and the company launched a simplified multicolor that said "Google!"

1996: First Google Logo

So, the very first search engine logo did not bear the Google name at all. Larry Page and Sergey Brin originally created the BackRub web crawler. And chose this name because main function engine was searched for backlinks on the Internet.

Luckily, by 1997 they had changed the name of the company to a less creepy one. However, “Google” is also a distorted word, it is an incorrect spelling of the Latin term “googol”, which literally means 10 to the 100th power (that is, one followed by one hundred zeros).

The idea behind the name was that the Google search engine could quickly provide users with a large number of results.

1998: First (real) Google logo

The history of the appearance of the first logo with the inscription Google does not have a single slender version: there is a version that it was ordered somewhere, and that Sergey Brin himself developed it using a free image editor called GIMP.

Whoever it was, the design wasn't exactly perfect.

Want another fun fact? The exclamation mark was supposedly included in the Google rebrand because the Yahoo! - the company's main competitor at that time - that's exactly how it was written, with an exclamation mark. Tech companies of the time didn't bother stealing ideas from each other.

1999-2010: Logo design by Ruth Kedar

A mutual friend introduced Brin and Page to Stanford University assistant professor Ruth Kedar. Since they didn't really cling to their old logo, they asked Kedar to develop some new prototypes. Ruth started with black, using the Adobe Garamond font. And removed the exclamation mark that was in the original logo.

Kedar recalled that Page and Brin liked the new version because the mark in the middle looked like a Chinese finger trap.

The next time the graphic designer used the Catull font. This logo was supposed to evoke associations with such concepts as purpose and accuracy, where two letters O are a compass and an bullseye.

Then Kedar decided to play with the colors and the double 'O'. the idea caught on and formed the basis of the graphic concept at the bottom of the search results page.

So, in the early logo, the letters were black, with the exception of the OO, which was supposed to look like a compass. But Brin and Page did not like the option with a crosshair and a magnifying glass, it looked “overwhelming”.

This is what an early title iteration of the Google logo looked like with solid colors, where the first O is a compass and the second O is a magnifying glass. The next few iterations look more like the Google logo we know today. 7 Kedar made the letters pop off the page with shading and thick lines.

The eighth design was the simplest. Ultimately, Kedar wanted to show the potential of Google, which was no longer just a search engine. And as a result, the image of the magnifying glass was removed. It also changed the traditional order of the primary colors to further emphasize how unconventional Google was.

2015: new logo for Google

In 2015, Google designers met in New York City for a week-long design sprint to... create a new logo. After that, Google changed dramatically. The company retained its distinctive blue-red-orange-blue-green-red pattern, but changed the typeface from Catull to custom school product Sans.

At the same time, Google released several variations of its logo, including a rainbow "G" seen on a smartphone app, a favicon for Google websites, and a microphone icon for voice search.

The new logo looked simple, but the transformation was significant.

Catull - the former font - has serifs (small details that decorate the main vertical and horizontal strokes of letters). Serif fonts are considered less versatile, as the letters vary in weight.

The full name of the desktop version of the Google logo Product Sans is a sans-serif typeface. That is, Google designers could easily adapt the logo to different sizes, for example, for the Android watch interface or the computer desktop.

As Google's product line has become even more diverse, design responsiveness has come to the fore.

The logo had to look modern, fun and harmless. That is, "I'm not like other big tech corporations, I'm a cool mass tech corporation."

It was a prudent move: Ever since Google introduced this design in 2015, data privacy concerns have reached a fever pitch.

Dynamic Logo

The Google logo has also become dynamic. Now, when you start a voice search on your phone or tablet, you can see the Google dots dancing. And they turn into an equalizer that reacts to your voice.

Introduction and growth of Google Doodle

In parallel, in 1998, Google began to play with the concept of Google Doodle - temporary modifications of the traditional Google logo. (In literal translation, doodle means scribble).

The first Google Doodle originated in 1998, before the company could technically be called a company at all.

Page and Brin were at The Burning Man festival, and as a kind of “out of office” message, they placed a figure of such a man behind the second letter O in the logo.

They liked the idea, and in 2000, Brin and Sergey asked then-intern Dennis Hwang to come up with "doodles" for Bastille Day.

Users also liked the idea, and they appointed Dennis as "head doodle."

Today, the Google Doodle concept is often used to mark holidays, birthdays of scientists, thinkers, artists and other important people.

The first google doodle images related to well-known events such as Valentine's Day, Halloween and Indian Holi. But over time, they have become more global and creative.

For example, on September 1, 2017, this doodle marked the first day of school (or mourned it, depending on who you ask.)

To decide which events, numbers or topics get scribbled, the team meets periodically to brainstorming. Moreover, Doodle ideas can also come from Google users. The original idea is taken to work and brought to mind by professional illustrators and engineers.

In 2015, Google reported that they had launched over 2,000 drawings on various sites around the world.

Here is such a curious story of changes in the corporate concept and design of Google. And with the speed at which everything is changing, we are likely to see another new version just a few years later.