If you’ve used Google recently — oh, let’s be honest, everyone in the U.S. who uses the internet is probably using Google every single day — you noticed that the new Google doodle is oddly simple and not very creative. And then you realized that it isn’t a Google doodle, but instead, the new Google logo.
The company announced on September 1 that it would be releasing a new logo design, and the design is what Forbes described as a more modern representation of the company’s importance in the digital age.
The logo was revealed just a couple weeks after the company announced that Google would be headed by a new parent company, Alphabet, and the font in the new logo certainly looks like the font you’d find in a child’s first learn-to-read book.
Google made a very small change in its logo’s design last year, Business Insider reported, which was such a minuscule change in the position of the second “g” and subsequent “l” that the difference was virtually undetectable. In fact, you probably didn’t even know that the logo had changed until just now, and to be fair, no one seems to know — even now — why the change was made at all.
The new logo change is much more obvious, as is the purpose behind it. The sans-serif font presents a friendlier picture of the company, but even more importantly, the font is better optimized to adjust to mobile device screens.
Even though approximately 19,000 new apps hit the App Store each month, a surprising amount of mobile device users still prefer to use mobile websites even when an app provides the same features and is free to download, as Google’s app is.
The company explained in a corresponding blog post that the new logo is the result of extensive testing and engineering, and is hopefully more representative of how Google will thrive in the mobile-focused future of online searches.
“Since its inception, the Google.com homepage has been strikingly simple: The quirky, multicolored logo sits above a single, approachable input field on a clean white canvas,” the company’s blog stated. “Users now engage with Google using a constellation of devices, and our brand should express the same simplicity and delight they expect from our homepage, while fully embracing the opportunities offered by each new device and surface.”