Google’s recently unveiled logo has, to put it mildly, caused some controversy. Some have disparaged the logo as childlike, evoking refrigerator magnets and schoolhouse penmanship lessons. In perhaps the funniest indictment of Google’s new logo, Sarah Larson of The New Yorker eviscerates the new ‘e,’ calling it “demented” and “showboating.” She has a fair point. The ‘e’ is more than a little unsettling.
Some say the logo hides or distracts from Alphabet — a corporate Big Brother lookalike founded by Google execs that acts as parent to Google and several smaller agencies. Alphabet will oversee Google’s many initiatives — the self-driving car, Google Glass, net neutrality, maps and others — with the aim to expand these enterprises to command larger portions of their various markets. One might begin to look out for ministries of love, peace, plenty and truth. With all this power amassed, is it crude to be suspicious of a conglomerate as extensive as Alphabet, particularly given Google’s new distracting look? Yes, it is. It’s certainly too soon to be suspicious, and we should give Google’s new logo a break.
While Google’s redesign gives rise to some answers, it also subjects the conglomerate to a great deal of scrutiny. Alongside Alphabet’s rollout — mired in its own controversy — Google needed an impetus to display its levelheaded transparency. The new logo allows Google this very opportunity. Transparency, I would argue, is at the head of this redesign, marking a small but perceptible accomplishment in Google’s/Alphabet’s new futuristic enterprise. To be clear, I don’t think Google is up to anything malicious revealing this simple new logo.
If you have yet to see this logo, I envy your ability to avoid the Internet. When you look at it, you’ll notice how clean the blocked lines look. The sparseness and simplicity — admittedly childlike — seem rather innocent. A drastic change from Google’s old-timey Serif font, the new typeface, Product Sans, avoids the flippant, decorative serifs used for the last 16 years. It absolutely reminds one of fridge-magnet letters or of drawing on the sidewalk with chalk, but this is not something to disparage.
The logo, for all the backlash it’s getting, has also upped the ante in terms of mechanics and design. Its simplicity allows it to translate easier to handheld devices, allowing it to be hypermediated quicker and more effectively across platforms. Distilled into four colored dots — appropriately blue, red, yellow and green — the logo becomes an interactive, oscillating assistant, helping to animate the space between interactions. This animation would have been far more difficult to pull off with the previous serif-heavy typeface. It would seem that the redesign was neither arbitrary nor particularly oppressive, as many would have us believe.
I explain the redesign by evoking more than mere mechanic leniency or nostalgic undertones. A logo that simple, pasted on a classically white background, can only be considered the opposite of glamour; down to earth, humble and transparent. I can’t speak for the individual personalities of Google’s leadership or their design team, but the façade they’ve created is nothing short of futuristic, with every hint of hope and possibility the word can convey.
The logo’s change has not only instigated scrutiny, it’s invited it. As Google becomes a more innovative (and, dare I say, compassionate) company, they amass the power and complexity of an Orwellian agency. But that’s OK. They are taking our trust and investing it in something shinier than anything a serif-rich logo could ever give us—compassion, innovation and enterprise beyond imagination. If this article is quoted at my funeral, and if everything’s changed by then, I invite them to say: He loved Big Brother.