Google has a new logo. Fascinating how much love and hate this change is bringing out. I think it makes sense to ditch the serif font for a sans serif font. The new font (Is that Roboto?) scales better and the tilted “e” gives them something beyond a mere rendering of their name in a typical font.
Best to let them draw it for you themselves. Click here.
Long, long overdue.
Cute animation. New logo looks good.
I like the word more that the ‘G’ icon. This article was enlightening. design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-identity/
I’ll say one thing for Google’s cloud-based strategy, it makes it really easy to update your brand in one fell swoop. I’m not seeing the old logo anywhere – gmail, search, maps, calendar, news, etc. – all updated.
Dave — it’s either Futura or Kabel. Geometric and modern, dating back to the Bauhaus and the 1930s. Definitely not Roboto. Farthest thing from it.
Roboto is a digitally crafted, humanistically inspired font. It ‘borrows’ from Helvetica and one other — can’t remember which. Begins with an M.
But, a nice choice. Good for google.
like it. Very modern
Jim! They stole the Heineken ‘e’! Get on it!
It’s not Futura or Kabel either. The closest I can think of is Relish Pro. But the defender in the lowercase “g” is sightly different. It’s probably a modified version to call there own using Relish Pro as a base.
By the way, not all areas of Google have changed. The landing page for Gmail is still the old font as well as their about page and others.
https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?
https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/
it’s a custom font, actually. See Macintosh’s link.
Custom, yes. Original? No.
They definitely use Relish Pro as the base for the design.
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/redrooster/relish-pro/medium/glyphs.html
Interesting… good eye.
I was going to point out that it is a custom design.
As in, a font designed by a committee.
I look forward to the font wars to come…
I can’t believe all the attention given to a logo change. The Verge is currently running 4(!) stories on this.
Reminds me a bit of Drescher Grotesque, a typeface I used for a reading-product flash card set in the last decade.
I was wondering where you were. A font conversation without you here? : )
Drescher is a BT font I think. A sans serif font? Similar to the font here no?
At any rate, It amazes me how many fonts have made there way to the digital realm. I remember in the late 80’s with the Linotronic wondering how they fit all the fonts and styles on the 5.25″ floppy. That and how incredibly expensive getting a bold reverse version was.
Then about ten years later I had a poster from Linotype which showed a few hundred of the most popular fonts along with a book of about 1,000 or so.
Now, I can’t always tell them apart, there are so many copies, and I’ve studied. This font though, I knew. It’s nice to see on occasion I can still spot a few.
Google is A/B testing it, right?
The bigger the brand, the more people who are going to see it and have an opinion. Still, I feel like this is nothing compared to when Yahoo! changed their logo. And people eventually got used to that one like they will for this one.
I’m late to a lot of parties. 🙂
Yes, Drescher is Bitstream’s, a foundry I was very fond of in the early 90s.
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/drescher-grotesk-bt/
The product’s original creator asked that we reproduce her original flash card typography as closely as possible, and I saw no reason to disagree.
As I remember, the Linoterms I started out on could only hold four fonts at a time, on drum-mounted film strips. 8″ floppies were for the text files. The CrTronics I used later used 5.25″ disks for OS, fonts, and text files. Needed two drives.
I remember the big Linotype poster; we had it up in the basement shop of my first college gig. And there are indeed a lot more fonts out there, making finer and finer distinctions between increasingly minor differences, it seems. I have no problem with that, except that I also take longer to identify many of them.
Find almost any obscure type-sample catalog from a previous century. Chances are good somebody has digitized or revived designs from it.
Agreed. Much better than that carnival-booth sign they had.
Some corporate identity redesigns fail for valid reasons. A few get pulled and reconsidered, like Arnell’s “Tropicana.” Yahoo!’s redesign still lacks the ability to scale well. Google’s doesn’t have that problem.
The actuarial tables give me about 23 more years on Gaia’s Earth, and I doubt in that time I will even begin to understand the mania for sans serif fonts that has gripped our world in the last 15 years. I find 99.8% of sans serif faces horrible to look at and impossible to read. Just me I guess.