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New Chrome Logo

googlesystem.blogspot.com

111 pointsGarbage74 comments

a new Chrome logo that's more plain and boring

Or less chintzy and less like a VCR manufacturer's logo from 1979. It looks good! It seems typical to have a strong reaction to a new name (iPad, Wii, Vista) or a new logo but it passes. Everyone will be used to it within months :-)

Yes! Yay, you made me feel less crazy. I like the new logo better, too.

Subjective retro-ness aside, the new logo is more of a logo (less textures, passes the silhouette test, etc).

I'm new to the notion of the silhouette test (had to google it) so forgive my ignorance, but how does this logo pass that test? Isn't its silhouette just a circle...?

If it were to be converted to a 1-bit image (Black/white) you could still make out what it is. That's basically the silhouette test.

This one doesn't quite work because there's no separation between the three colors that make up the circle. Not that it needs to, though. This one is better than the last for this test. In this case the silhouette would be the larger outer circle and the smaller inner circle.

It's really only used in print design, or at least that's how it started because logos needed to be versatile enough to work in many different color spaces, including being sent via fax. It is useful to keep in mind so that we create clean and uncluttered logos, though.

Word. You're right. I was over-hypey :D It doesn't totally pass the silhouette test. It could with a thin edge of negative space in between each color block, OR... if we allowed a grey "cheat" in our silhouette test.

These kinda shape logos aren't just awesome for print, but in tiny places like web footers, twitter avatars, etc.

And for anybody in the thread rackin' their brain trying to figure out what we're talking about. Picture the Nike swoosh, or the Apple-missing-a-bite apple. With no gradients, colors, or shadows, their shape alone is recognizable.

This doesn't mean their every use + instance is this plain, but their logos survive such a deconstruction. It REALLY comes in handy.

I like it too, but I can't help but feel that it is slowly morphing into the Windows logo;

Definitely. I think the 'Looking like physical items' thing is just a phase, and will soon look as dated as 'translucent glass beads' and 'embossed cursive font'.

'Flat, simple iconography' is the future, man.

To me it looks like something designed by Fisher Price. The original has a sci-fi feel to it, like a high tech machine that looks simple, but hides a lot of high tech inside. Even the subtle details on the side of the yellow portion lead you to think there's more than what the eyes can see. The new logo says 'toy'... and nothing else.

Not Fisher-Price, Milton Bradley! http://www.flickr.com/photos/22653270@N00/2822604151/

Yep, I like it too. The old one was tacky and busy it seemed to contradict the sleek, lightweight nature of the product it represented.

Perhaps I read too much into logos, but I'm convinced this change is for the better.

My favourite quote from the comments: "looks ugly and is not the original"

Sums up every UI change reaction ever.

That's why I only use applications that use the Athena widget set!

I feel this logo looks better when sized way down to "Windows quick launch bar" or "GNOME launcher" size, but for instance on a Mac dock it's completely out of place with it's 2D look & feel.

Glossy embossed days are far behind. Subtle gradients, trying to achive 3d in 2d space with less cluttered effects. I would say very in tune with Apple's next design iteration. http://www.usabilitypost.com/2011/03/01/simpler-ui-in-lion/

> Glossy embossed days are far behind.

Could this really be happening? Could the universe be so kind?

Glossy might look good for five seconds, but when you spend eight hours staring at shiny windows flying across your screen you tend to get sick.

I have the same with glossy screens, which have so become the fashion in the past years. Instead of the pixels, I see a mirror image of myself. I was in a big electronics shop yesterday and all laptops had glossy screens!

I can't wait until the 70% transparent, white-fill gradient half-circle is no longer masked over logos and icons.

What exactly do you mean? Do you have an example?

I believe the white glossy circle is referring to that glossy shine on top of icons, much like the app icons you usually see on an iPhone/iPod.

For instance: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ikoka/3660963620/

Oh, right. Now I understand. Yeah, you see those a lot.

styles come, styles go...Better to be a trend-setter rather then trend-watcher.

That's a very interesting article there. The thing that bothers me the most about OS X is how it looks so monochrome (and, by my definition, boring and less usable), like it's mentioned on the "Less color" section. I like to use color from icons to guide myself and by going monochrome I just can't do it. On the opposite side there's Google's sidebar which has so many colors mixed-up that it's as usable as Apple's monochromatic style.

One can easily argue that monochromatic UIs are less distracting though. But it does remind me of USSR architecture...

Not just the next iteration: Apple has been toning down the Aqua look in every version of OS X. The original Aqua was very much an offspring of the 1990's iMac aesthetic with candy colors and pinstripes everywhere. The pinstripes were the first to go, and each update has switched some glossy element to a more flat look.

While I think the original Chrome logo maybe had a bit too much “3D”, I think this is a bit too far in the other direction.

Something in between this new logo and the previous would probably be appropriate IMHO.

> The latest Chrome Dev Channel release comes with a new Chrome logo that's more plain and boring [...] Chrome lost some of its magic by switching to a visual identity that's no longer vibrant and picturesque

Wow. My thoughts exactly when seeing the new logo, but I'm surprised Google would put it this way!

> An unofficial blog...

Ah, that makes sense.

Well, plain is not necessarily boring. In most cases, including this one, I prefer the plain version. One example other than Chrome is Pepsi, the new plain logo looks so much better to me than the sort-of-3D old one. I guess it's very subjective.

> I guess it's very subjective

Yes it is ;-) There was a post on HN some time ago showing how old logos were in many cases so much better than new ones, and Pepsi was amongst them.

But, Google being Google, maybe they tested it? The problem with tests, I think, is that it favors bland versions because they upset the least; this new logo kind of smells of "design by committee", no?

Brand New is a blog devoted to old/new logo comparisons: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/

> An unofficial blog...

I subscribe to this blog rather than the official Google blogs for this reason. I get to hear about the interesting new features, but none of the marketing spin from Google themselves.

I still think the old logo looks just like the "Morph Ball" from the Metroid games.

http://www.google.com/images?rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS397US397&q=...

Just a curious question that has nothing to do with the Chrome logo.

Your link has the rlz string that is presumably for your Chrome/Chromium browser. Can that be personally identifiable information for anyone other than Google?

"non-unique, non-personally identifiable" - http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/in-open-for-rlz.html

I always thought it looked like a morph ball from Metroid fused with a Simon Says: http://www.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&biw=1439&...

The old icon looks more at home on Windows and Mac desktops.

The new icon looks more at home among the other Google products. (http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/options/)

Whether there's any significance to this, I don't know.

Ouch. My personal feeling now is that there's no intuitive connection between the logo and the thing it represents anymore. Firefox has a red panda curled around a globe, representing both the name and what it does (the globe being a common symbol for the WWW). Internet Explorer has a Windows-blue 'e' for "explorer" [of the internet]. Safari has a compass, which is related to both safaris and navigation. The old chrome logo wasn't great, but at least it was really shiny. When I think 'chrome', I think really shiny, so it made sense to me and I could easily make the association backwards, that the really shiny logo meant 'chrome'. The colors might represent Google, but honestly I didn't notice that until just now. When I see red, yellow, blue and green, I just think primary colors -- RGB for light and RBY for pigment. In my head, red, yellow, blue and green are just the "default" colors for anything where you want something to have four different "equal" colors without it getting clashy or garish. (As much as I love the secondary and tertiary colors, using them all together can sometimes make things look younger than intended.)

To me the new logo looks vaguely like someone went paint-by-numbers on the James Bond shutter. There's nothing there that I'd associate with the internet, the word "chrome", the concept of a navigation tool, or anything else like that. It might be more aesthetically-pleasing but that's not what logos are for.

The colours need a bit more saturation to really pop, they're a bit too washed-out and pastel. I like the concept, but the execution is poor.

I agree, the old logo wasn't without its problems, but the new one, while different, is not really an improvement. It looks very..."flacid" to me.

Yep, in fact I like this version I found earlier a lot more than the one they went with: http://www.frazpc.pl/b/275384

The colors need a bit less saturation to really become subtle, they're a bit too bright and overly-chromatic. I like the concept, but the execution is poor.

I like it. The old one looks like an electronic eye, monitoring my every move on the internet.

I always thought it looked a bit like a Pokemon ball.

It looks a lot like the GladOS balls from the game Portal, too.

http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs22/f/2008/005/e/3/Blue_GLaDOS_B...

These have eyes.

I've always thought that too. It /is/ a google product, after all.

The new logo does not appear to have been designed with smaller icons in mind - the white circle around the blue center is too small (or shouldn't be there at all). In its present form, it looks pretty bad on my dock.

I find that it actually looks better. Then again, as a zen master would say, it does not look better or worst, it has simply changed.

So, they took a logo with depth (3Dish) and flattened it, plus did something kinda weird with the color. It doesn't look quite right with all the other icons on my dock.

Simplicity. That is one of Google attractions. So, the new Chrome logo fits that image better than the old one.

It looks like they wanted to simply flatten the Chrome logo, but the gradients radically change it from a sphere with a central "node" facing us to an unappealing doughnut shape with some sort of "nipple" in the center.

And while the gloss of the original may have been a bit much, it allowed the colors to be a bit more vibrant. Now they've been diluted down to these pastel colors which are also very unappealing.

The original Chrome logo isn't perfect, it looks a little too slick, but it was the best visual design to come out of google (besides some amazing google doodles of course) and now it seems that they've dumbed it down to match the more simple and design-agnostic approach that is typical for google.

I love the flatter aesthetic, but man does that strong white ring make me want to push the center blue "button". It actually brings that feature so far to the foreground that I ignore the rest of the logo. I would seriously prefer a thinner white circle.

If everyone starts aiming for the little blue center, I wonder if people have a better chance of clicking the icon. Maybe they thought of it like extra padding around navigation links. When we aim for the original icon and miss by a couple pixels, nothing happens. If we are drawn to aiming for the little blue circle and miss by a couple pixels, Chrome still opens.

Here's a more design oriented discussion: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/chrome_l...

I, for one, just switched to the Dev channel for the updated icon.

The comments on the post lead me to believe that most people would prefer an icon that blinks or rotates.

That said, I like the new icon. It's far less of an eyesore in my OSX dock.

I like the new logo, but I didn't expect to see a logo change of the official Chrome that early. There are still a lot of advertisements showing the old logo around in my city.

Deleted comment

"On OS X, each icon can have different images from"

As on Windows and on the gnome desktop.

Yeah, but that was hardly my point, if the reason for the change was visibility in small size, they would have been better off just modifying the icon. I definitely agree that it does have higher visibility in small size than the old one.

I don't think the new one looks better than the old. New = too basic Old = too much details

I saw this yesterday and loved it. I'll spare you my critique - the logo new logo is great!

I'm on the fence for whether I like shiny logos that everyone is doing these days more or the same or less than non-shiny logos. The new logo makes it stand out, but I'm not sure in a great way among all the other gloss. I'll wait and see.

Is there any design related reason that explains this change? Or is this just random?

One reason might be that the change brings the logo more in line with the Google identity. Google usually doesn’t do shiny and photorealistic, the Chrome logo was always a strange aberration in that respect.

This reminded me of the 2008 Google Reader redesign, where some of the rounded borders and shadows were dropped.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/12/square-is-new-round...

In the case of the simplified logo, "square is the new round" would seem to apply again.

When do we get the new square Chrome logo? :)

Yes, it certainly seems that way. Recently Google has also changed the logos of gmail, gcal, greader etc and this looks like Chrome's turn.

/sad - I submitted this yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332488

It went from 'impressive and high tech' to 'dull and uninteresting'

I feel like I would like the logo more without the gradients.

It looks like a 9.

Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

i just see 666

Of an infinity of 69s! ;) My brain looped.

Like the big white arrow in the fedex logo.

I was more excited when I thought that this said Chrome LEGO.

Same here.

From pokeballs to frisbees

It's OK as a logo, except for the inconsistent light source on the shadows. As a toolbar icon, it seems like they decided to redesign it so that it violates every OS icon guideline in existence, except on Windows Phone 7.

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