Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the Google logo and we have to say, it’s come a long way.
While most companies keep their same outdated logo throughout their entire life spans, Google’s logo – like the cheesy tilted toggling letters or a flattened font fusion with its parent company Alphabet – seems to evolve just as much as the company. Here is the history behind the Google logo.
Although Google officially became a company in September 1998, it’s original amateur logo was born a year prior in its demo stages at Stanford as covered by Gizmodo.
This year, the Google logo gets real. While the original design was dated and a bit cheap, this logo was definitely the start of something more serious, yet playful. It showed the world that Google was ready to change the world.
Here we see a slight change in colors with the first ‘G’ shifting from green to what is now the permanent blue. Google also added the short-lived Yahoo!-like explanation point, which may have been the start to the verbification of the word ‘Google,’ whether that was intended or not.
This logo is the most sophisticated of Google’s designs, which is probably why it stuck around for so long. With its Catull font, it was simple, yet still playful. As Gizmodo quotes the words of its designer, Ruth Kader, “The texture and shading of each letter is done in an unobtrusive way resulting in lifting it from the page while giving it both weight and lightness.”
In 2010 there is a very slight change in texture and brightness. Much of the shadows have been lifted and the lettering colors are more vibrant and lively.
Although it might not seem like a pivotal transition, this logo evolution was monumental. At this time, Google goes completely flat with its logo. By alleviating the stiff edges and soften some of the angles, Google’s icon becomes a little more legible.
When Google obtained its new holding company Alphabet, Inc., in September 2015, it seemed to have merged logo fonts as well. The current Google logo has a very similar look – with some subtle discrepancies – to its new parent company’s logo. Interestingly, while Alphabet, Inc. technically owns Google, Google officially owns the alphabet now. Just last year, the company bought the domain abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com, according to a report by CNBC.
Although the evolution of the logo through the years has been both subtle and at times dramatic, there is no doubt that these tweaks have helped Google become one of the biggest and most influential companies in modern history.
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