Google’s New Icon: It Sucks & Now You Can Submit Your Own

Jun 7, 2008 at 8:20am ET by Danny Sullivan

As we’ve covered earlier, Google’s updated its icon recently to one it said reflects a “simple, playful and unique” brand. Today, the company has blogged more about the design change and calls for ideas from others. Good. Sorry, that new icon is just ugly to me, no matter how much design work went into it. I want the old one back.

Over the past two or three years now, more and more people have been referring to Google as the “Big G,” to reflect how important the company has become. How fitting that its old icon was indeed the Big G from its name, Google.

Now it’s little g, and I find myself hating that icon every time I see it in my browser address bar. It looks weak, or like there’s something wrong with my browser that’s not rendering the image properly.

In today’s post, Google explains that it was looking for a symbol that means Google, something it felt it was lacking. I think the Big G was indeed that symbol. But good news, perhaps — the decision’s not final:

By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more unified set of icons. However, we really value feedback from users and want to hear your ideas that we may have missed. If you have your own notions about the Google favicon, please send them to us. We’ll do our best to work them in, and maybe your idea will be the one that people see billions of times per day.

C’mon Big G lovers, tell Google to go back to what worked before. They’re looking for feedback here. That form also lets you submit your own favicon for consideration. I’m disappointed this is a requirement — that you can’t just say “Go back to the old one.”

For more discussion, see Techmeme.

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Danny Sullivan >

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