News

Google Has A New Logo

by Jenny Hollander

On Tuesday morning, behemoth Google unveiled a brand-new logo that looks... an awful lot like the alphabet toys you played with as a kid. As of early August, Google has operated under its new parent company, Alphabet, the result of a large-scale restructuring that saw the original co-founders of the mega-corporation, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, running Alphabet, and former product manager Sundar Pichai running Google itself. Surprise, surprise: Google's softer, rounder new logo looks like kids' alphabet blocks, or the little magnetic alphabet letters that were stuck to your childhood fridge. That might not be a coincidence.

"Today we're introducing a new logo and identity family that reflects this reality and shows you when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens," Google said in a statement Tuesday.

When you open up the Google search engine, the original logo appears, and is wiped out by an invisible eraser. Then, the new logo — which inherited its relative's colors and blank background, but has adopted a more playful, younger feel — is written out onto the search engine by a little hand holding a crayon.

"As you'll see, we've taken the Google logo and branding, which were originally built for a single desktop browser page, and updated them for a world of seamless computing across an endless number of devices and different kinds of inputs (such as tap, type and talk)," Google's statement noted.

If the old logo is already a distant memory, keep in mind that it looked like this.

And now...

Does that look familiar?

No? How about this?

This isn't the first Google logo change, but it's the biggest since 1999, reports The Verge. Along with an official statement noting that the new logo "doesn't simply tell you that you're using Google, but also shows you how Google is working for you," Google released a video to help explain the change.

In the video, the new Google logo is a shape-shifter, dancing around in little colored dots on Android operating systems before morphing seamlessly into the logo again.

And that icon? "Meanwhile, we're bidding adieu to the little blue 'g' icon and replacing it with a four-color 'G' that matches the logo," Google explained in its statement.

The unexpected logo change from one of the world's most ubiquitous companies has, of course, prompted an outpouring of responses from Twitter.

Images: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images, Lake Shore Learning