I was using Google the other day (surprise) and noticed something was different but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I went to their blog and see that they have made a few subtle changes.
First off, the Google logo has been updated to be brighter and simpler and a little more up to date in my humble opinion. There is still a drop shadow but it is much more subtle. The letters still have dimension but are more refined with subdued shadows and hi-lites. They got rid of the ™, too. Here’s an image comparing the old logo (top) and the new logo (bottom):
The footer on the search results page no longer has a light blue bar and the links now have no underlines. The letters that spell Goooooooogle are also bigger and brighter. Here’s the old footer (top) compared with the new (bottom):
The “left-hand nav” of search tools has also been updated with icons and a bit of reorganization.
You can check out some of the prototypes that were tried before settling on the designs above by clicking the links below that I pulled from their blog page:
- Blue homepage: We’ve always had a strong affinity for blue — after all, blue is usually the color of web links, so it binds the web together. It became the basis for many designs.
- Blue button: The big blue button made it all the way to our first external experiment, where it was promptly rejected by users. We heard you loud and clear and changed the button in the next round.
- Universal bars: This design emphasizes different types of results with labeled blocks in the main results pane, such as books, news and shopping.
- Blue results: This is one of the final blue designs we created and marks the point when we renamed the “Web” link to “Everything” — a label that gets closer to the intent of our mission to organize all the world’s information.
