Articles: How to draw a nice icon for Google

Not so long ago, we scolded a new Google site icon with the letter g and called it bad . But scolding someone else's is not difficult! What icon would be good? We decided to answer this question: we took four designers and made them draw a good favicon for Google. We call such an approach - work according to the “fucking creative boutique” scheme. The result is fascinating stories that describe four different solutions to this problem.

The story from Denis Kortunov

In general, I sincerely believe that Google needs some kind of symbol. To make it simple and cool. It is clear that there are no directly related metaphors, so the symbol is likely to be far-fetched. At first, no one will like it, but then everyone will get used to it and calm down.

But I showed weakness - I abandoned my idea with a symbol and decided to base the icon on the current Google corporate identity. What do we have? Six letters in Catull font . The letters G and O occur twice. Of the two letters O, as you understand, nothing good can come of it. We will work with the capital G - it is simple and beautiful.



Plus, we have four colors in which the letters of the logo are painted. Blue and red are found twice.



What will we take for our future favicon? The capital letter G will be the basis, it would also be nice to use corporate colors: at least two, but all four are better. We will not use the font - I do not really like it, and it will be difficult to distinguish it in the small icon size.

I wanted to take something simple as the basis of the icon. For example, a circle. Or a few colored circles. Here's what I got at first:



It seems to be cool: three signature colors, circles open, with the help of violent imagination you can see the letter G, well, there is an association with the target. But in the size of 16x16 problems started - the icon turned out ugly. I continued the search. <

Now there are all four colors and the letter G can be seen more clearly. Let's bring a little shine:

And here is the new favicon in action:

History from Yegor Gilev

Since the theme of letters was brilliantly (literally and figuratively) disclosed by Denis, I decided to offer an even more abstract symbol. For example, a ball. What could be simpler than a ball? In addition, a variety of balls have long been used in the logos of various Google products: A



ball can be understood as a globe, or as a ball. He kind of tells us: “play with me”, which is quite suitable for the image of Google as a company young, fun and often avoiding generally accepted corporate rules.

Looking at the Google logo, we will draw a ball painted in 4 colors:



Let's give the ball volume (without being carried away by complexity - we need an icon 16 × 16 in size):

Add a little more glare and shadow, and voila - this is the icon:

History from Valery Namazov

It's no secret that Google has long ceased to be just a search engine. This is a real mix of various technologies and services. Conclusion: we mix company colors in Turbo Blender!



Next, we open Wikipedia and find out that the name of the company comes from the word googol - a number in the decimal system represented by a unit with 100 zeros. It is clear that we have no other way but to make the favicon round and with a hole.



Reduce to a size of 16 × 16:



And this is how it looks in the browser:

History from Dmitry Zhukov

Like it or not, it's better not to find Google! And why? Because Google has an excellent search, and only then all other services with a trailer.

Ta-a-ah-ak, but what is the search? Search is first all results. So I almost blurted out, now you can definitely steal my great idea. Well, if someone else does not understand, I am enclosing the illustration.



Here we take them into circulation. It remains only to look at what happened.



The icon remotely resembles the symbol of infinity, which in the case of Google is also completely not superfluous.