Legal Research

Google Favicon

By Simon Fodden

You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, that little graphic that appears ahead of a site’s URL in a browser’s location field. (Slaw has a white ’sl’ in a blue square, for instance.) Turns out that Google wasn’t changing for the sake of change, but in order to accommodate the various new modalities that now use browsers — PDAs, iPhones, cell phones etc. They’re in the hunt for one that will scale well and look good in various contexts.

The ones they’re testing now belong to this family:

As you might imagine, choosing a new mini-logo for one of the world’s giant corporations is no easy thing. Google considered a whack load of possibilities, some of which they’ve posted on the Official Google Blog:

I can’t say I’m enamoured of any of them. And maybe Google feels the same way, because they want feedback and, it would seem, your proposed alternative designs:

[W]e really value feedback from users and want to hear your ideas that we may have missed. If you have your own notions about the Google favicon, please send them to us. We’ll do our best to work them in, and maybe your idea will be the one that people see billions of times per day.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 07, 2008 (boomark / email).