Woke up this morning to upload the theme and noticed a strange new icon in some of the tabs. Didn’t spare a second glance at them till much later.. when I decided to see what lay behind those strange new tabs. To my surprise, they were Google Search results …branded with a new logo. It’s quite a far departure from the earlier blockish icon they had - and it’s going to take some time to get into that familiarity mode with it. This definitely was one of the “lesser” surprise changes on part of Google.
The differences
As you’ll notice from the picture I’ve compiled, while the earlier one had distinctly defined edges with a solid white background, the new one has a hint of gradient in the background with no hard-edges. The icon is also transparent and looks pretty cool on a backdrop of any given colour (except a close shade of blue or course - where it’s rendered almost invisible). This shouldn’t be of any major concern to Google as the icon is supposed to appear only in the browsers address bar, which in 90% of cases sports a white background. Google’s new fancy seems to be rounded-corners and this icon is no exception. The upper-cased “G” has fallen out of favour for it’s lower-cased counterpart - “g”.
Shortly after this I was hunting for any other news articles when I came across one from Google Blogoscoped in my feed reader. They’re wondering if Google is undergoing a large-scale re-branding while sticking to their self-proclaimed core value of Thinking and Acting like an underdog.
