Rop graphic design blog: January 2017

Logo research assignment

Peter Christy

I have decided to do my research on the Google logo. Google was originally known as backrub but changed their name around a year after that. The original Google logo,created in 1998 looks very similar to the modern one but with some differences. The G is green instead of blue and has a serif typeface. Later, they added an exclamation mark to mimic yahoo and changed the G to blue. In 1999 they removed the exclamation mark and changed the typeface. Slowly, Google make the shadow smaller and smaller until it was gone entirely. Finally, they changed the typeface to sans serif one in 2015 to make the logo we know today. The old small logo was a blue G, but they changed it to a blue, green, yellow and red G. Ruth Kedar, the logo’s designer, wanted the design to look almost “undesigned” and playful. The Green L stands out as the only non primary color on the logo nowadays, this may have been to illustrate that google doesn’t follow the rules. A likely reason for the new sans serif typeface is to make the logo similar to their parent company, Alphabet, which has a similar logo but with the word alphabet and only red text. The Google Logo uses color likely to demonstrate a universal feeling by using primary colors of light and pigment. The typeface also is a simple one that also shows its reach, it doesn’t need fancy type or colors to individualize itself, it is THE simple type and color logo.