It’s a little “narrow” for my tastes. But my tastes are monospaced, so there’s that.
Monospaced is good for certain purposes, e.g. screens or certain kinds of tables.
The narrow font is well-suited for engineering tables (hence used there) where many characters have to be fitted in columns at the width of an A4 page or often even way less.
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I understand the Algerian hate, but one place where I will accept it is on the logo of London’s Algerian Coffee Shore.
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Ugh … Google’s wordmark. Did they even consult a designer?
Hoefler? Tobias Frere-Jones? Somebody?
Are they trying to make this some kind of grand crowd-sourced experiment in public design by being purposely bad?
At least have the courtesy of using Neuw Haas Grotesk (improved retro-Helvetica) if you don’t know what you’re doing. Many times, it’s actually harder to design a sans-serif than a serif typeface, due to proportion issues.
There’s a reason why type designers refer to “display fonts” and “type fonts.” A wordmark is a display font. You need to create a font family for different uses in order to scale correctly to the human eye (such as screen vs. print, small / large point sizing) .
Critique:
- Use geometric Glyph-serifs. Slightly Latin but not choppy terminals.
- Strokes are too thick in proportion to letter-spacing. It looks like a clumsy bold font. Stroke-width is especially important when using lots of white-space.
- The capital “G” is too perfectly circular and broad. Narrow it.
- The "o"s should have counters slightly off vertical axis.
- The single-storey “g” is bland. Leave a hint of a neck in the loop and a spur on the descender.
- Make sure the taper on the “e” slants more-carefully in conjunction with other serifs, as well as the eyebar.
- Even though it’s kerned, it still looks monospace.
- The overshoots are overwhelming, making the “l” look like it’s floating. Balance the single-storey “g” with the “l” stem and the “e,” again.
This is kinda like the new in-house designed Renault logotype, which has gotten plenty of criticism BTW, but still looks better than this crap.
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Well, it was probably something like this:
[quote=“godspacejuno, post:26, topic:64899”]
Passionate, nerdy critique[/quote]
Ah, the language of my people. I don’t necessarily agree with much of it, but it was an enjoyable read. Frankly, I hoped for more amusing snark on the kerning because it’s such a wide open target (lol?), but you did good. Four stars.
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Interestingly, I just saw this article; apparently the logo design was done entirely in one “week-long design sprint” by their internal design teams. They describe the result as having the “childlike simplicity of schoolbook letter printing.” So for better or worse, they succeeded in creating a non-logo logo, a word mark without flourishes or excess of style, except for the tilted ‘e’.
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I still think the ‘baby’s first book’ style is perfectly appropriate for what Google wants to be seen as. As opposed to the ever more tentacled, all-seeing behemoth they don’t want you to think of at all.
Just look at that reveal “doodle” with the words being drawn in crayon. Or the whole concept of doodles. Think of the name “Alphabet”, and the ‘abc.xyz’ URL. Heck, think of the name “Google”. Pure baby talk. Each letter a bright primary color, like a 4-year-old’s idea of a cool design. Just look at it.
Strip away the drop shadows, bevels and other bad-design affectations (as they have done) and it’s obvious the brand has always been all about the kindergarten. They’ve just updated it to look less 90s and more in line with all the other Alphabet brands that are sure to follow and, they hope, rule us all from on high.
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Totally agreed. I think a lot of folks are startled by how simple their logo is and automatically assume simple = bad. But they intentionally stripped fashion and design out of their logo and went with the simplest thing possible. I don’t think many people are seeing the bigger picture of their branding: the primary kindergarten colors, the Alphabet name, the simple circles and squares. I think as we see the new brand in action and see how it works with the Alphabet branding, mobile, cars, space, whatever, it’ll be clear that this is the way to go for them. Especially with the four active dots acting as a ‘color logo’ with no word at all.
And yes, the word mark is definitely custom-drawn. Personally I would’ve tightened the kerning but hey whatever 
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And yet it’s still better than the current Pepsi logo.
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I actually noticed the new favicon for Google when I was searching something today. I like it. But then, I don’t know anything about design.
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Interestingly, I just saw this article; apparently the logo design was done entirely in one “week-long design sprint” by their internal design teams.
Explains everything. “Design” teams. Pifffff 
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Which is why you like the wrong stuff.
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How can an opinion be wrong?
Dear Google: FTFY.
Your people: 1 week. Me: 8 hours.
If you like it, please pay me. I could use the job.
Thanks!
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Da Vinci font makes it look like “Googlié, Fashion Accessories for Classy Dogs.”
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What are we looking at? I don’t see a difference between yours and Google’s.
Thus proving that logos don’t really matter?
Or proving the job is harder than it looks?
Stare at it for a while and let me know what you see.
Which one would last longer?
When it is humor-impaired?
##De gustibus non est disputandum, quia ego sum LEGITIMUS.
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The one on the right has awful Gs and gs. The l is also problematic. I think the e got punched. There’s something slightly hinky about the oos. Startled, perhaps? Anemic?
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