60minuteswiththegeeks

On Google’s New Favicon

My first gut reaction to the Google’s new favicon was: “Someone got it all wrong here, this ain’t Google, and this is a miss”. I personally just didn’t like it. To me, the new favicon doesn’t complement the Google brand and I felt it was at conflict with it. It felt like a discordant tone in a symphony, although subtle, yet spoils the whole harmony.

I am not any of those queer folks, those hippie likes who might want to make a religious following of the Google brand and consider sacrilegious anything that might tamper with the brand, but at the same time, In an unexplainable way, I felt what might be described as ‘being protective’ towards the Google brand. I considered the new favicon not appropriate enough.

THE COLOR
The first thing I noticed as a discord is the color of the logo. God! I don’t think Google is Blue! If am to make any color association with the Google brand it wont be color blue, the colors that will come to mind will be a montage of white, red, yellow and blue. It is a combination of the colors, and since the favicon will be the closest thing to a logo Google will have, I am of the personal opinion that the favicon should have been designed around this in mind. The old favicon rightly reflected the true Google colors.

THE CASE
The Capital ‘G’ and the ‘oo’ in the word ‘Google’ carries the most emphasis. And if I am to design an identity using a single alphabet for Google, I will most likely make the alphabet uppercase. Doing that will carry more weight, dominance and exude confidence; something I feel the ‘g’ in lowercase fails to do.

Marissa meyer, VP Search Products & User Experience, gave us a peek into what is going on in her blog post on the Google blog. Where she said:

“The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.”

I was actually glad when she also said that:

“By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more unified set of icons”

Checking out the other designs they came up with:

I would have preferred those ones that put into considering the points I earlier highlighted.

I personally will want this to be changed…but then again I think the best thing for Google to do is to pay attention to feedbacks and act accordingly.