Google seems to be attempting to destroy it’s status as an iconic trademark of the Internet with it’s rollout of the new Google favicon today. The new Google icon is a blue, green, and red, splat with a white little “g” inside the random color swatch.

Why did they do this? According to googlesystem.blogspot.com, an unofficial Google tips and news site, Big G threw out the internationally recognized “Big G” favicon last year. Users weren’t happy with the new little g logo, so they took some ideas, and apparently not wanting to give any glory to an actual graphic designer, did some sort of childlike bastardization of one of the submitted ideas.

So, in about one year, they have gone from having a highly recognized trademark, to having some sort of horrendous unrecognizable stain in the corner of their users’ address bars. This reminds me of when New Coke came out. There was nothing wrong with the original Coca Cola, but damned if they didn’t want to fix what ain’t broke, and New Coke was born.

Customers flatly rejected the new formula, and demanded to have their good old Coca Cola back, and thus was born Coca Cola Classic. Well I, among many others demand to have our “Big G Classic” back. There was nothing wrong with the original work. It was easily recognized universally. Outrage against the last change was probably more a result of “Change it back” than it was of “Make it even less coherent.”

I can’t imagine the Christians, for example saying, “Gee the old Cross symbol is just so bland. And we’ve been using it to represent our religion for a really long time. Let’s come up with a new logo that if you tilt your head, squint, hyperventilate, and take a bong hit at the same time, you just might be able to make out a cross on the inverse of the patchwork of colors.”

You just don’t mess with something that is so easy to recall, but Google insists on messing with their favicon formula. One day the google new favicon will be replaced with the Big G classic favicon, but for now we’re going to have to endure the atrocious little g stain google favicon.

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Lol! I found this at the Mattress Police, and it made much the same point about not changing a branded logo.