Articles: How to draw a good 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 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 this approach work according to the “fucking creative boutique” scheme. The result was fascinating stories that describe four different solutions to this problem.

History from Denis Kortunov

In general, I sincerely believe that Google needs some kind of symbol. That he was simple and cool. It is clear that there are no directly related metaphors, so the character is likely to be contrived. At first nobody will like it, but then everyone will get used and calm down.

But I showed weakness - I abandoned my idea with a symbol and decided to base the icon on Google’s current corporate identity. What do we have? Six letters written in Catull font. The letters G and O occur twice. Of the two letters O, as you understand, nothing good can come out. 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.
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What will we take for our future favicon? The basis will be the capital letter G, it would also be good to use company colors: at least two, but all four are better. We will not use the font - I don’t like it very much, and in the small icon size it will be difficult to distinguish.

For the basis of the icon, I wanted to take something simple. For example, a circle. Or a few color circles. Here is what I first got:



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

Now there are all four colors and the letter G can be seen more clearly. Bring some shine:

But the new favicon in the case:

History from Egor Gilyov

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



The ball can be understood as a globe, or as a ball. He seems to be telling us: “play with me,” which is quite appropriate for Google’s image as a company of a young, fun and often avoiding generally accepted corporate rules.

Looking at the Google logo, let's draw a ball painted in 4 colors:



Let's give the ball a volume (without being carried away by complexity - after all, we need a 16 × 16 icon):

Let's add some more highlights and shadows, and - voila - this is how the icon turned out:

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: Mix the company colors in TurboBlender!



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



Reduced to size 16 × 16:



And this is how it looks in the browser:

History from Dmitry Zhukov

Anyway, it's better not to find Google! Why all? Because Google has an excellent search, and only then the trailer has all the other services.

So, what is the search? The search is first all the results. So I almost all and blurted out, now you can definitely steal my great idea. Well, if someone does not understand, I attach an illustration.



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



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