I love the new Google identity. It's a difficult rebrand, but the design direction and identity system is no surprise given the foreshadowing from Material and Alphabet. It's not "amazing", but it's about as good as it gets for such a well known company with a humble design beginning. The original logo was so bad that anything new would be better. The new word mark no longer sticks out like a sore thumb in Material designs.

I think people hate the new word mark because it's so damn geometric. Geometric typefaces evoke rigidity, sterility and lifelessness. Perfectly circular "o" and "g" is also how many of us learned to write in primary school, hence many people's comparison to children when criticizing the word mark.

The reason I don't like google's rebrand, aside from its lackluster aesthetic, is because I think it is a betrayal of the brand itself.

I saw Google as elite, to foster excellence, to be authoritative, and mature, in a tech sphere where the news often features yet another adolescent enterprise. The brand inspired hope because of its ability to accommodate seemingly dichotomous imagery: the sober, reliable, establishment with the playful, Easter egg packed, wonders that blurred the lines between engineering and magic.

It made me hopeful because I saw an adult with the heart of a child and that's what I want the whole world to be.

I'm not saying Google has changed as a company because of this rebrand. These are merely what their symbols meant to me.

I like Google's new logo. Good article, though.

I wonder when they will go completely lowercase?

I agree. I can't think of a time when I cared in the least what a brand did with it's logo, but .... Ugh! It's so ugly! Playskool is what I think of.

Playskool is how I thought of the old logo. At least this one is inspired by a desire to conserve bandwidth rather than being the best aesthetic decision a bunch of engineers could come up with using microsoft word while just trying to check off the logo requirement of running a company...