(logomaker.com)

Nikos Salingaros sent me an essay from The New Yorker, “Why You Hate Google’s New Logo,” by Sarah Larson, that sums it up for me and, I’m sure, many others. She concludes by calling on Google to change back to its old logo, and I join her in that call.

A commenter on my own post about the logo change urged me to look stuff up on the search engine of Yahoo, which he said was more effective. He does not hate the logo change as much as he hates – maybe distrusts is more accurate – Google itself, especially since it has taken over so much of our digital lives. For those of us who have come to rely on Google – its searches, its email – we simply would rather have the friendly logo back rather than having to look at the new logo from now on. I have concluded that it is not really a child’s refrigerator magnet alphabet but something more sinister – basically, I am going back to my original view that the logo change suggests, no doubt subconsciously on the part of Google unless it truly is much more sinister than I think – that, like modernist architecture, it represents all the worst that humankind its “progressing” toward.

But read Larson’s essay in The New Yorker. It is very thoughtful and lovely, albeit sad. Here’s a teaser:

The new logo retains the rainbow of colors but sheds the grownup curlicues: it now evokes children’s refrigerator magnets, McDonald’s French fries, Comic Sans. Google took something we trusted and filed off its dignity. Now, in its place, we have an insipid “G,” an owl-eyed “oo,” a schoolroom “g,” a ho-hum “l,” and a demented, showboating “e.” I don’t want to think about that “e” ever again. But what choice do I have? Google—beneficent overlord, Big Brother, whatever you want to call it—is at the center of our lives. Now it has symbolically diluted our trust, which it originally had for all the right reasons.