With all the talk about new logos lately, it's about time Google did a little revamping of its own. Hidden in the latest version of Chrome Beta for Android is a new design for Google's ubiquitous logo, one that probably shouldn't have seen the light of day this early.
Here's a comparison image:
It's flat! All the beveling and shadows are gone, and the colors have been tweaked from their traditional primary color pallet to more muted shades. The result is a cleaner, more modern design that seems to be the complete opposite of the recent Yahoo disaster.
I dug this image file out of the Chrome Beta Android APK, where it was briefly being used for the new tab page before someone noticed and it was pulled. It's currently inaccessible without ripping the APK apart.
Update: another sighting. You can also spot this logo on Google's servers. The normal logo on Google.com is https://www.google.com/images/srpr/logo4w.png, but Joshua Stewart figured out that just by incrementing the number to 5 or 6, you can see the new design.
So we know this new logo exists and that it is officially from Google, but we don't know if it will be used company-wide. It would certainly make sense for Google to roll it out for everything, because this looks about a million times better than the current logo. If this goes live, it would become the company's first logo redesign since 2010, when it toned down the shadowing and brightened up the colors. That design was also tested before it went live. As for this new design, we'll just have to wait to see if Google adopts it across its properties. Let's hope.
Another update: The Verge cites "a person familiar with Google's branding" as saying that the flatter logo won't be replacing the main logo anytime soon. The flat version is used when the traditional bevels won't display well, and that it was accidentally added to Chrome. It looks like Google will be sticking with its current logo for a while.
Thanks to Rajesh Handa for the tip.
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