The print in Gutenburg bible is higher resolution than the type on most (non-hi-DPI) screens, though, so the serifs are visible and useful. On digital screens, the serifs make everything muddy at small sizes.
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I came across a perfect expression of this concept a few days ago:
Everyone wants progress, but no one wants change.
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" would read again"
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Unless, apparently, theyāre thick, brutish slab serifs. Kindle, Iām looking at you.
āfiā to serifs, i say!
Why drop the squirly g? I like those gās.
I think we are due for some backlash to stark minimalism. Time for the return of fiddly bits.
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I guess Iām the only person who hated the old logo and likes the new one?
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Thatās[1] a ligature, you insensitive clod. 
[1] okay, should beā¦
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Wow the vitriol is surprising. As soon as Iād seen the new logo, the old one instantly looked dated. Especially on mobile (the lower-case g as an app icon is terrible) the old logo was really out of step with the relentlessly simplified and streamlined aesthetic of their applications and their competitors.
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They are both kinda enh, but the squiggly lower case g on the old logo was nice.
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Made this earlier today, because it was obviously needed.
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Personally, I love serifs. Because some asshole font designers donāt think itās important to make I l | and 1 look in any way distinct from each other. Because āfuck communication, fonts are just decoration, and not at all important for transmitting information.ā
Also, my exact first thought looking at the new logo was āKindergartenā.
Does google think weāre so simple our eyes will get snagged on the hook of a properly differentiated lowercase āLā?
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THAT THAT THAT!!!
Whoever designs a font that has identical looking symbols, double so if within the bottom 127 bytes of ASCII, should get publicly hanged as a warning for other ādesignersā.
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Iād be happy with just tarring and feathering. Then making them write out their fontās full unicode index page in 8x8 foot letters on the beach using a stick.
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I wasted too much time dealing with people who couldnāt read passwords because their mail or chat client or whatever else used crappy font that made different characters look the same.
So, rope it is. A bullet is too good for them.
Good heavens. Many folk design fonts knowing that information will be viewed in context. Typography (in practice), is also a matter of the choices of the end-user. If you find you donāt see enough visual difference between a few symbols in one typeface, there are literally thousands of other fonts to choose from instead.
Typography doesnāt exist to make | universally distinct enough from 1, I, or l. Thatās why we have fonts like Source Code Pro or Courier.
Itās fine. Minimalism works best when the information it contains is paramount. Google appears to understand this, and this is how Google works: hereās your info, see ya.
In that sense, I think the logo works very well. Nobody remembers logos anyway, itās just not important. So why would they invest in a āmemorableā logo for a service which works purely by redirecting users away once they get their results? Visually, that would be wasteful.
The old logos were tackyāengineers arenāt always gifted with a sense of whatās tasteful in design; thatās ok, (although if you hire Scott Kim, you never go wrong). This change is a good improvement on that.
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For different reasons, though. The serifs also help the ink to bleed properly, and mimc the cuts that Romans made in stone to give the letters cleaner endings. Sans serif fonts had problems with ink bleed, thatās why Bell created Bell Sans. LED displays are the opposite, and prefer cleaner lines over serifs, since they still are blocky and donāt have to compensate for how the ink and paper interact.
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That is not the attitude of any type designer Iāve ever known of. Have you talked to one? These people are obsessed with the tiniest detail that affects legibility. Maybe their bosses/clients think that way. Probably.
Probably, itās just that I mostly ever run into Times New Roman, Calibri, Tahoma, Courier New, and Arial. And the only ones I can unambiguously tell all the characters apart with 100% accuracy even when Iām not even paying attention is Courier New and Times New Roman. And that matters, pretty often when all you do is work on scripts with no sentence structure or natural grammar.
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