Chrome is changing its logo for the first time in eight years
Chrome is changing its logo for the first time in eight years
Chrome is changing its logo for the first time since 2014, and if you look really hard, you can really see what's different. Alvin Hu, a designer for Google Chrome, gives a first look at the logo's redesign in a thread on Twitter, as well as providing some of the thinking behind the sometimes subtle changes.
Instead of including shadows on the borders between each color, essentially "raising them off the screen", red, yellow and green are just flat. And while not mentioned by Hu, the blue circle in the middle seems bigger and makes your soul mate stare even more, but maybe that's just my imagination.
The colors in the logo look more vibrant (perhaps due to the design team getting rid of the shadows), but there's another change I might never have noticed if I hadn't read Hu's Twitter thread. Apparently, Google's design team found that "placing certain shades of green and red next to each other creates unpleasant color vibrations." To fix this and to make the icon "more accessible", they decided to use very subtle gradients - I believe not even the human eye can see - to prevent any color vibrations. for.
The main Chrome logo (the one you click on from your dock/taskbar to access the web) will not look the same across all systems. On ChromeOS, the logo will appear more colorful to complement other system icons, while on macOS, the logo will have a smaller shadow, making it appear as though it is "popping out" from the Dock. Meanwhile, the Windows 10 and 11 version have a more dramatic gradient so that it can fit in with the style of other Windows icons. Hu says that if you use Chrome Canary (the developer version of Chrome), you'll start to see the new icon now, but it will roll out to everyone over the next few months.
There are also some new icons for the beta and developer versions of the Chrome logo, with the most dramatic change being the blueprint-style icon for beta apps on iOS. Hu also noted that the design team experimented with a white line that acts as a border between each color, but found that it made the overall icon smaller, potentially among other Google apps. . Difficult to recognize.
From 2008 until now, the Chrome logo is slowly becoming simpler. What started out as a shiny, three-dimensional symbol has been transformed into a 2D symbol of modernity. Maybe one day my wish will come true and I'll be able to see the almost tangible 2008 Chrome logo on my desktop once again. But not today.
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