My colleague Sarah – Head of Marketing at RedBalloon picked this detail up – and she shared with me because she knew that I LOVE this sort of thing.
Years ago when I worked at Apple I was accountable for marketing to the printing and publishing industry. The design community took me aside and taught me about detail and consistency (demanding this from the Mac – now we take all that WYSYWIG stuff for granted). Brand recognition is built through consistency.
I have often wondered why and how Google can have so much fun each day by presenting its logo to suit the mood of the day in it’s search engine. With a billion searches done daily you would think that consistency is everything. The point is once you are at Google you know that you are there – no recognition required – so instead they use the logo to entertain and give personality to the brand.
That is not the case when the logo is used elsewhere – style guides abound – and perfection is important. A brand needs to get it right! For those with an eye for detail it represents whether a business does take care of the detail in other aspects of the business too. It speaks of it’s integrity and it’s values.
So what did Google do recently? It moved the “g” right one pixel and the “l” down and right one pixel, according to one eagle-eyed Redditor. Done to fix a very slight problem with the kerning of the letters.
Gizmodo wrote about the change, and got this statement from Google: “Great to see people notice and appreciate even single-pixel changes—we tweaked the logo a little while ago to make sure it looks its sharpest regardless of your screen resolution.”
Compare the two versions of the logo below, also via Gizmodo: