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Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

They actually give a reason why they changed it in the blog post. Saying that the old one was designed for desktops and the new one is meant to scale better (for things like watches and phones I'd guess).

Edit: to add from their design blog[0], the new logo can be sent to a client in 305 bytes of compressed SVG (vs 14,000 bytes for the old logo). So it helps with lower bandwidth. The design post also mentions scaling of the logo.

[0] https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident...

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Yes, anytime there is a logo change there is a bunch of marketing talk about why. It's all bullshit. At the end of the day it was because someone wanted to make their mark and got a chance to do it. A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota.

And it will be slightly changed in another couple of years by some new VP who wants to shake things up and get that next promotion.

Yes, I always think it's the designer equivalent of the programmers who always blame pre-existing codebases no matter what, until they refactor it the way they like.

> Yes, anytime there is a logo change there is a bunch of marketing talk about why. It's all bullshit.

You refute that the old logo didn't scale down to smaller screens well? Getting the logo visible across mobile devices was a major part of the redesign. If your job is logos and branding, that seems like a real problem. And branding does affect a company's outcome, certainly more than "one iota". You are acting like a terrible cynic and troll.

>"It's all bullshit. At the end of the day it was because someone wanted to make their mark"

Anything them there MBA-types do is bullshit, am I right? In fact, I have no idea why Google doesn't run from the command line only!

I'm sure glad to have HN around to tell me how most of the machinations of a large global corporation are pointless.

By the way, do you have one shred of evidence that this was a VP looking to get promoted?

No, MBAs do a lot of important things and I have no idea if anyone involved in the post has an MBA. The language used in this post uses a lot of words to explain nothing. It's basic corporate bullshit. MBAs are good at it, but by no means are they the only shovelers.

When I was younger I didn't use Yahoo! because I disliked their logo and the use of ! in their name.

Petty? Yes. Did it effect their market share? By at least 1 - yes.

I highly doubt I was the only one to act like that. Design matters. Even if you don't think it does.

For those wondering, I also didn't enjoy listening to Panic! At the Disco. They also eventually dropped the !.

I guess I shouldn't ask if you're a Godspeed You! Black Emperor fan...

> A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota.

Ah, but it will. When you're a company like Google, with hundreds of millions of users a day, it's only a matter of time that something like an outdated logo will start to lose you customers. People make sub-conscious inferences about your product based on appearance. If you start looking like that thing everyone used to use, they'll start looking for alternatives.

Google's logo is so important to keeping users around that they frequently replace it with a silly animation about a current event.

This redesign was for Google executives, not Google users.

Was about to make the same point.

Is that your gut instinct or is there research to suggest that that's the case?

My personal process for using Google (not saying everyone is the same, but...) goes something like this:

1. Type "g" into the address bar

2. Press enter, because www.google.com auto-populates at that point

3. Start typing my query while the animation of the day is loading

4. Press enter

5. Review the results

Why not just run the search straight from your browser's address bar or search field?

Because, for good reason, not everyone has that set to Google?

At least in Firefox, you can search multiple providers from the search bar. I believe other browsers can do this as well.

I could, but it's more of a force of habit- but if I did that would further prove my point that the choice of logo doesn't make any difference to people using the site for search.

> They actually give a reason why they changed it in the blog post.

This was the part where I literally thought "How do they come up with this bullshit?".

It doesn't sound genuine at all.

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