Various Google Favicons
The old saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That is the quickest way to break something.
One week ago, Google seems to have done just that — again — with their latest change to their favicon. Something that went unchanged for 8.5 years with their classic “big G” icon.
Last Friday some people had thought they were at the wrong site, or even that their favorite search engine was hacked when a new icon began to appear in their browser.
Google first changed its favicon in June 2008 and many people had said that one was ugly. At least one website was since created and dedicated to “bring back the old google favicon“.
This may have been one of many reasons why Google decided to choose another favicon and began to solicit ideas from the public.
“We wanted something distinctive and noticeable, so we aimed toward transparency or semi-transparency, so the image would have a more distinctive noticeable shape than just a block,” said Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, Google. “We wanted something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn’t date itself. Since we don’t really have a symbol that means Google, we felt it best to work with the logo and letters within it. Our design team tried literally hundreds of approaches.”
André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired the latest favicon. The new favicon uses all the colors from Google’s logo, while keeping the same lowercase “g”.
“His placement of a white ‘g’ on a color-blocked background was highly recognizable and attractive, while seeming to capture the essence of Google.” said Mayer. “We hope you like the new favicon, which nicely integrates all of our original criteria: distinctive in shape, noticeable, colorful, timeless, and scalable to other sizes.”
“By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final. It was a first step to a more unified set of icons.” said Mayer. “While I’m sure we will update it again, we also hope our new favicon inspired by Andre is a warm, colorful beacon to Google on your browser tabs and bookmarks.”
My Favicon Idea For Google
Well it seems that the number of people opposing this new design far out number those in favor. And I for one thought they could have done better.
Mayer had also stated, “If you have your own notions about the Google favicon, please send them to us.” So I spent a few minutes photo-shopping my idea of what a new Google favicon should have looked like.
Among my reasons behind this idea are:
- My “g” has instant recognition from their current logo in use, whereas, the “g” in their new icon is not so easily identifiable.
- My icon appears to be more professional and better represents a corporation taking charge all the other parts of a growing company symbolized by the “g” we know and the balls using their logo colors, whereas, their “g” is lost among the bright colors in the new icon.
- My design contains their “famous” plain white background. They change the simplicity of that and we may as well use Yahoo or something.
