Cease the presses, shutter your blinds, and cancel your weekend plans—Google’s simply modified its emblem. It is modified its emblem for the primary time in 10 years. That is enormous information on the planet of selling and branding. What, one wonders, is that this tectonic shift to the face of one of many world’s greatest tech corporations? What new aspect of design would possibly trend-set the logos of the world for the subsequent decade?
Somebody hit it with a Gaussian blur, mainly.
As reported by The Verge, Google is rolling out this variation piecemeal—beginning with updates to Google app on IOS and Pixel telephones, and sure coming to a search engine close to you. Actually, the one search engine you doubtless use.
The change is, to place it politely, minimalist. Once I say “simply hit it with a Gaussian blur”, I am exaggerating a bit of, however not a lot. I double-checked with my non-colour-blind colleagues after doing this, however I popped the outdated emblem into some photo-editing software program and hit it with the Gaussian blur software simply to see if my intuition was proper. Google’s new emblem is on the left, the one I edited is on the fitting.
It is dang shut. The precise emblem has a bit of extra yellow in it, and mentioned yellow yaws a bit of nearer to the orange spectrum of sunshine—which is perhaps as a result of my blurring made the unique G a smidge clear, one thing I solved by duplicating the layer rather a lot and merging all of it collectively.
Which leads me to a really humorous conclusion: This is perhaps the most costly Gaussian blur in historical past. Model redesigns, regardless of how small, are extremely expensive. Here is a shortlist I gathered simply by doing a little bit of (and the irony will not be misplaced on me) googling:
In 2022, the BBC spent £7 million on its rebranding, a proven fact that needed to be wrung out of them throughout an “eight month freedom of data battle”. British Petroleum got here underneath fireplace in 2000 for a emblem redesign that reportedly price £4.6 million (and one other £132 million to rebrand “its stationery, van liveries and manufacturing vegetation”).
Probably the most egregious instance is when, in 2008, Pepsi apparently spent a million on a emblem redesign that moved the crimson and blue traces of the emblem barely. This was revealed years later in what I can solely describe because the funniest leaked doc I’ve ever set eyes on. At one level, it compares the Pepsi emblem to the Earth’s magnetic subject. The phrases “Pepsi Power Fields” are on an official doc from the Pepsi firm circa 2008, and I’m not kidding.
How a lot did Google’s redesign price? I’ve no clue, and except the corporate releases the numbers itself, we’ll by no means discover out. However we will safely assume given each the size of Google’s operations and the historic priority that it was rather a lot. It was some huge cash.
Anyway, I am not keen on dunking on the workforce of graphic designers who undoubtedly put a variety of onerous thought and work into Google’s new emblem. They’re working on ranges of consciousness of each design principle and advertising know-how which can be unfathomable to me. Redesigns like this are costly as a result of they embrace rounds upon rounds of design, fixed talks, iterations, focus group testing, analysis, and so forth. It is a complete operation.
However you have gotta admit, it is a bit of astonishing. Hypothetical hundreds of thousands spent to, effectively, make the G a bit of blurrier. Wonders won’t ever stop.
