Google’s Logo: Please Touch

Arts & Entertainment, Culture

Here’s a bite-sized bit of visual rhetoric for your daily blog-scrape. One of my weekend rituals, in fact a way of willfully embracing my impending old age, is watching CBS Sunday Morning while enjoying my morning coffee. While typically fare for the geriatric set or the hoighty toighty, I’ve noticed that the magazine show is increasingly leaning in the direction of the Internet Age with its programming. Case in point: today’s episode had a fascinating segment on the history of Google’s “doodles,” those augmented logotypes that pop up on days such as the anniversary of the barcode, DaVinci’s birthday, Halloween, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. What started out as a modest task bestowed upon an artistically inclined intern has now evolved into an integral part of the “Google experience” and now involves a small army of graphic designers and artists who meet regularly to discuss which upcoming anniversaries are appropriately “googly.” Over the years, the tendency to augment, obscure, and even obliterate the logo (as in the one for Jackson Pollock’s birthday) has become increasingly commonplace.

Brand identity is much more than just a logo, a point that Google gets. Most companies see their logo as a sacrosanct space, inviolate and untouchable, but Google ignores this brick-and-mortar corporate truism. In fact, early on in the company’s history, Google saw its logo as a space for play, for ethos building. The fact that they often opt to commemorate events that lean more towards the science/technology/art end of the cultural spectrum and less towards the political/divisive end attests to the kind of image they want to convey: perhaps a touch more of “Don’t be controversial” rather than “Don’t be evil.”