Google logo 29 november. History of Google logos. Creation of the letter G

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 redesigns of the company's logo, which appeared both before and after the presentation of the new logo.

The company logo has been updated in 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, multicolored 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

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 they chose this name because the main function of the engine was to search 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 search system Google 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 harmonious version: there is a version that it was ordered somewhere, and that Sergey Brin himself developed it with the help of free editor images called GIMP.

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

Do you want another one 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.

Next Graphic Designer I used 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.

First google doodle images treated well famous 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 brainstorm. 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.

Every day, the Google site processes about 3,500,000 search queries. With these statistics, it's highly likely that each of us sees the Google logo anywhere from one to 30 times a day.

The Google logo has been iconic and easily recognizable for over two decades.

In fact, the company had two "first" logos. In 1996, it featured an image of a hand and the company's original name, BackRub, in red. After rebranding to Google, the company introduced a simpler logo in 1998 in the form of a colorful Google!

What a lot of people don't know is that the most famous design on the internet has an exciting backstory. And it all started in 1996.

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 a huge amount, or googols, of 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 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 the Google product line expands, there is an increasing 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".

Google Corporation is one of the most popular in the world, and the success of its founders has inspired many IT industry enthusiasts. The face of the company is the logo that represents its aspirations and mission. The history of Google logos over nineteen years has many variations. We propose to consider how the most recognizable Internet image in the world has changed.

History of the logoGoogle

The Google homepage is an example of minimalism and simplicity. However, this was not intended. The fact is that the founders of the company Sergey Brin and Larry Page, being students, were poorly versed in HTML.

This can be seen from the first logo that Sergey created for the then-scientific project at Stanford. It's funny, but he drew it in a free "drawing tool", of which there are now thousands on the Web.

Obviously, when the student project grew into a promising company, this option did not suit anyone. So Sergei asked design teacher Ruth Kedar to create a new logo.

She was given a clear task - to distinguish Google from competitors and reflect the endless possibilities of the search engine in the logo.

Note: The name Google comes from the English number googol (one followed by a hundred zeros). Such an association reflects how the creators saw the work with information requests.

Ruth submitted eight sketches during her time on the project. I must say that this path was not easy. Step by step, a logo was created, which subsequently set a trend in the design of Internet sites.

The starting point was a sketch created from the initial wishes of the customers: leave most of the text unchanged and add playfulness. This is what came out of it▼.

Sergei and Larry liked Ruth's way of thinking. The interlacing of the letters "O" reminded them of a Chinese puzzle. However, the designer took the phrase “leave the text unchanged” literally. The logo is too simple. After some time, she presented the second sketch.

The main part of the text remained the same, but one of the central letters was seriously reworked. The target symbolized the relevance of the received information to the entered search query. However, the idea was rejected. I had to start over.

The third option was seriously different from the previous sketches. The designer changed the font from Catull to ITC Leawood, added colors, changed the case and interlaced the central letters. In general, they liked the idea, but the founders did not like the metaphor with the Olympic rings.

When working on the fourth sketch, Ruth added more colors. I wrote the word in uppercase and created two graphic elements - the letter "O" stylized as a magnifying glass and their intersection. Because of this, the logo came out overloaded and too strict. Well, the owner is a gentleman. I had to keep working.

In the design of the fifth logo, the intersection was already missing, but the magnifying glass remained. Changed register and order of colors. The first and last letters are made in the same color, which indicates the accuracy of the results issued by the search engine. The stylized "O" was meant to add playfulness to make people associate surfing the internet with fun. However, this sketch was sent for revision.

The sixth sketch almost hit the bull's-eye. It is easy to recognize the logo of a famous company in it, and everything is in order with playfulness. However, despite the satisfactory design, it was not clear whether to leave shadows. In addition, questions arose about the order of the colors. Ruth got back to work.

In the seventh version of the logo, the colors were reordered and returned to the Catull font. In general, the design was close to ideal, but the raised letter "O" raised questions. During the presentation, we decided to get rid of additional graphic objects, since in the future an extra associative array could limit the company. As we know, this decision was the right one, because Google today is more than a search engine.

The final version of the logo reflects the essence of the company. Scattered colors show that Google is a unique search engine that cannot be limited, and the variety of information provided is difficult to fit into the usual framework.

This logo appeared on the main page of the company in 1999. After that, two more designs were created in 2013 and 2015.

Google Doodles

Do you know what a "doodle" is? ‘Doodles’ - this is how this word is translated from in English. A similar direction in creativity arose from the usual drawings on the margins of notebooks. They are characterized by cartoonishness and thick, even strokes.

You ask: what does Google have to do with it? Despite the fact that at the dawn of the company, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were students, they went to the festival in Mexico. To inform users about this, the programmers placed a “burning man” on the logo with a link to the event.

This idea fell in love and eventually became a tradition. In 1999, the company congratulated people on Thanksgiving and Halloween with similar postcards. In the latter case, the central letters "O" were replaced with two "jack-o'-lanterns".

For the first few years, the founders of the company did this on their own, but in the early 2000s they established new position. Since Dennis Hwang became the doodle specialist, cartoon animated pictures have started to appear more often.

The list of holidays includes the birthdays of famous people and significant historical events: Bastille Day, the date of the birth of hip-hop, independence days of various countries and others.

In addition, if a person has a Gmail box filled with personal data, Google will wish the user a happy birthday with a simple doodle. Like this one ▼.

Someone might think: why bother with the logo, because it's just a picture. What does she decide? The answer is simple: when your goal is to be the best in the world, it matters how you are perceived. In this case, when creating a logo, you need to look 20 steps ahead. The founders of Google understood this as well as the importance of being close to people, which is helped by the tradition of doodles. This approach makes the corporation one of the best among technology companies.

The first Google logo by Sergey Brin's

The very first Google logo was developed by co-founder Sergey Brin (Sergey Brin "s) using a free graphics program. The idea of the Google logo is a distorted word Googol, which means ten to the hundredth power and characterizes the endless performance of the new search engine. In 1999, Sergey turned to Ruth Kedar, who taught design at Stanford University.
Ruth's task was to create unique logo, which would clearly distinguish the new search engine from competitors such as Yahoo, Excite, HotBot, LookSmart and Lycos and embody a unique vision for working with web search.

Google logo designer - Ruth Kedar

Sergey looked at preliminary logo design ideas and liked Ruth's style of work. After repeated discussions and revisions of the sketches, the eighth version of the Google logo design was approved. In just a few years, the Google logo has become as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or the NBC peacock. Today the Google logo is known all over the world. And then no one could have imagined that Google would be one of the most recognizable brands in the world, that Google would become both a noun and a verb at the same time!
Ruth Kedar created a playful and seemingly simple logo. The bright colors of the Google logo evoke pleasant feelings of joy, like we're playing a child's game when we use Google. The thin lines of the font are easy to read. The shadows of the logo letters are made in an unobtrusive form, which gives the Google logo a lightness and, as it were, lifts it above the web page.

The Times-Roman font was the most common font on the Internet at that time, sans-serif fonts were used mainly in printing. Sergey Brin was looking for a typeface with serifs, but not inferior in its readability to sans-serifs. The resulting font is based on Catull, which has an outdated serif style. A search engine, by its very nature, is an archive, and archives keep history. Therefore, Catull represents the bridge between the past and the future, between the old analog world and the new technologies of the digital age.

The first version of the Google logo

Google logo #1
Typeface: Adobe Garamond Font: Adobe Garamond

From the very beginning, Ruth knew that the Google founders wanted the logo to be where most of the text style would be intact, and only a few elements would add playfulness to the logo. Ruth created the logo, where the element that unites the letters O consists of four primary colors and visually creates an infinity effect. Sergey Brin and Leri Page liked this element of the logo, it reminded them of the Chinese finger trap. But the logo was too flat and two-dimensional, which limited the idea of infinity.

The second version of the Google logo

Google logo #2

Instead of finalizing the created logo and giving it space, Kedar changes only one letter O, making it multidimensional. The idea behind this Google logo is to show the accuracy of search results with intersecting lines (target).

The third version of the Google logo

Google logo #3

Kedar remembers this version of the logo with a grin. Google, go to the Olympics!
Intertwined rings - a metaphor that is associated with different cultures in different countries. In those years, incidents in design with an associative series were more common.

The fourth version of the Google logo

G oogle logo #4
Typeface: Catull Font: Catull

This version of the Google logo looks more formal and corporate, thanks to the uppercase letters. And yet it remains playful due to the colored letters. But the logo turned out to be overloaded, there were too many details. The founders of Google liked both the graphical elements, the intersection and the magnifying glass. And it was necessary to use one of the elements, so the work on creating the logo continued.

Fifth version of the Google logo

Google logo #5
Typeface: Catull Font: Catull

Here is another attempt at creating a Google logo. Ruth Kedar did not use the intersection of lines in this version, but transformed one of the letters O into a magnifying glass. The first and last letters are the same color, which symbolizes the exact match between the final result and the initial search. And in between - anything! And of course, a smile that confirms the user's satisfaction with working with the search.

The sixth version of the Google logo

Google logo #6
Typeface: ITC Leawood Font: ITC Leawood

This version of the Google logo was close to being approved. Already at that stage, the developers knew that the number of pages of search results would be accompanied by a stretched Google logo with alternating float letters O, according to the developed concept. But they did not know what to do with the color of these letters, what color sequence to choose, whether to use shadows under the font.

The seventh version of the Google logo

Google logo #7
Typeface: Catull Font: Catull

At this stage in the creation of the Google logo, both the founders and designer Ruth went down the path of minimalism. They abandoned any objects in the logo's outline, which could further limit them. What if Google becomes much more than a search engine? Why then is there a magnifying glass in the Google logo? Ruth was faced with the task of making the inscription of the logo so that it was recognizable and identified without additional symbols and graphic elements.

The final version of the Google logo

Google logo #8
Typeface: Catull Font: Catull

Many color options for the Google logo have been developed. And the final idea was not to repeat the colors in order, but to make them random, thereby showing the uniqueness of Google, the originality that cannot be fit into the framework and rules.

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