Google's New Logo Looks A Lot Like Alphabet's

Google unveiled its new logo on Tuesday morning, securing its place in the Alphabet family. Alphabet is a new holding company for Google; the company took ownership of the search engine in early August. Google's logo has now changed to reflect their change in ownership. It sports a sans serif font, but maintains a similar letter spacing, as well as its iconic blue, red, yellow, blue, green, red color pattern. The aesthetic is still a distinctly Google one, but the new font brings the Alphabet vibe to the foreground. What's interesting is that the Google logo is by far more recognizable to the everyday Internet user than Alphabet's. So while the new Google logo looks a lot like the Alphabet logo, the association of the new logo will remain strongly with Google.

This is to say that while Google has clearly made a change to echo the visuals of its new parent company, nobody was publicly aware of Alphabet before the hyped-up announcement was made that the company acquired Google on August 11, because Alphabet was completely brand-new at the time. Google wants to visually align with their new ownership, and even though their new logo echoes Alphabet's, it mostly just looks like a stylish Google redesign than anything else.

Although Google is under new ownership, the design change seems to have been made more to promote or elevate the presence of Alphabet than it to raise prestige or trust in Google. Which makes perfect sense, given that (at least in the West) Google is more or less synonymous with "the Internet." Given that Alphabet is owned by Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, this is a very intentional choice, meant to visually draw a connection between Google and Alphabet. Alphabet is an overarching network of companies, of which Google is among unrelated groups like Calico and Nest.

Regardless of the new change in font, the Google logo still looks like the familiar image we're all used to seeing when we need to look something up online. After all, it's not as if anything about Google has changed on the user end of the spectrum. It will still settle debates, bring us pictures of funny cats, and help us find what to order for dinner. As long as we still get adorable and topical animated images on Google's homepage, I'm perfectly fine with the new Alphabet-esque tweaks.

Images: Screenshot/Google