Google Has a New Favicon
Saturday January 10, 2009
Favicons are those little pictures that appear on the upper corner of your browser tabs or address bar. The one for About.com looks like a red ball. The Google favicon was the same for years, but they decided to change it over the summer to a blue lower case "g," but invited people to submit better ideas.
After getting many submissions, they decided to change the favicon to this: 
. It's certainly colorful, but my eyes are just not getting used to it. I don't see the "g" right away. I think I like André Resende's original submission better, but I'm sure I'll get used to this one soon. What do you think?
This writer is a former reporter and publications editor, not someone skilled in the graphic arts and design. But the new “favicon,” which is a new, unexplained term to me, fails. One does not need to be a designer to recognize that.
I did a Web search & only through did I discover that the design is supposed to represent a lower-case “g.” That is enormously non-obvious, substantially because of the small size of the design element. I’m no great expert in the metric system, either, but what is the size of a favicon? On my iMac’s screen, a favicon appears to be an eighth of an inch square, or round, as with about.com’s favicon, or roughly 3 millimeters.
That’s way too small for a complicated image to jump out. Recognizing it is made further difficult by the fact that the largest single color element, the green that occupies the lower right quadrant, is–and I’m not entirely certain–not part of the ‘g.” Apple had a multicolored corporate logo, which it scrapped, wrongly, in my judgment. I don’t know whether its colors had any deep corporate meaning, but one could see the logo and recognize an apple in it.
I can’t recognize the “g.” Although every Google user sees the favicon, this could be an occasion for scrapping the corporate colors. (I assume the red represents the Ould Country of one of Google’s founders, a favored color that predates 1917.) Perhaps including all four colors would work if they were banded, as in the old Apple logo.
While I loathe and despise the politics of many in Google, that has nothing to do with giving this appalling design decision a low rating.
I agree that Andre’s original design is much nicer. The only reason I could think of why Google felt compelled to change it was that his original design looks vaguely hourglass-ish, probably not a thought they wanted to encourage.
it looks like a B
what more can i say?