Here's a copy for anyone that can't see it:
http://www.rubypay.com/google/Google.htm
The version on Google's site is a little different, it clears away the static particles when the logo is in motion.
Love it, one of the more interesting google logos. I'm still not sure whether dynamic identities are good or bad for a brand. The pros are it keeps the brand fresh, it allows the users to interact with the brand. But the cons are it can make the brand less recognisable and maybe the confusing for some users. Thoughts?
Consider how many other companies are having their logo blogged, discussed and emailed around to friends today like Google's. I think you'll get your answer about whether it's worth it for them.
Anyone else finding it...slightly annoying? I mean it's neat-looking, but having a big distracting animation pop up every time I open a new browser window (google.com is my home page) is a little less neat.
I find it very visually disorienting. It literally made me throw up last night-that's not bashing Google or anything. I was already feeling rather nauseas due to a migraine at the time. I went to look up something, and it was.... just too much.
This is probably some kind of first for the guys behind the Google logos.
The particles are divs styled with border-radius and position:absolute. Seems like SVG, Canvas, or CSS transforms would be better; I wonder if they chose border-radius and position:absolute for speed or compatibility? I don't have a copy of IE around to try; do they do something different there?
It's amazing the hoops people are willing to jump through to get fast graphics on the web. When WebGL comes out and makes all these hacks obsolete you're going to start seeing some really amazing stuff.
Never mind that, does everyone else get the funky new streaming search results on google using Chrome?
1. Go to google.com
2. Start typing
3. It moves the search box while you're still typing
4. It starts streaming and updating results in real time as you type.
This is seriously distracting and I really wonder how many users are going to be completely dumbfounded by the circles floating around where the logo used to be.
An event-based illustrated logo is a simple switch-out. There's not much resistance to understanding the meaning there. The Pac-Man game logo was a bit more complete, but Pac-Man is universally recognized. This on the other hand - how may people will see the logo when they move their cursor away and understand that something on the page isn't broken - that it's intentional?
It will be interesting to see the larger reaction from everyday Google users.
The Pac-Man doodle triggered hundreds of support calls and problem tickets for the makers of browsers and antivirus software. A big part of that, though, was the fact that it played sound (even when the Google search page was loaded on a background tab).
I'm not... I must have seen about 100 tweets today from people talking about the logo, plus stories on social news sites like HN and Reddit etc.
It's a genius idea because the frequent changes are enough for some people to keep Google.com as their homepage and it gets people talking about Google as well.
I don't like their links fading-in (I could click faster on, say, language tools if I had not to wait). Now they make my browser choke (firefox on netbook, cpu in powersave).
http://www.google.com/ncr should take you to google.com rather than a local search such as google.co.uk. However, I still don't see anything with Chrome or Firefox when trying this.
I've been developing a Javascript intensive bookmarklet for the past month or so. It works on FF, Chrome, Safari, even IE6. But on Opera, I cannot figure out why it behaves so glitchy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it never, ever shows me any errors. Maybe this has to do with the fact that it caches things even when you tell it not to. In addition to that, AFAIK there's no way to deselect text (without breaking other things), which makes developing drag and drop pretty much impossible on it. It's "developer tools" show you a big list of "errors" which are mostly it knit-picking various CSS properties things that it doesn't support, like rounded corners for example.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe my code is getting run perfectly, but it's just happening so blazingly fast that it doesn't affect anything at all. In which case, I'd still give Opera the big "fuck you" that I'm feeling after writing this.
I've also found that Opera is annoying about caching stuff that it thinks is local (192.168.. or file:///). It aggressively caches, and is reluctant to reload, certain pages on our Django site on our local dev machines - but the problem doesn't repro on production. I don't know if it's a bug, or a setting I can turn off, but if I work it out I'll let you know.
fun game: try to see how many particles you can trap in a corner while the rest of the logo stabilizes. I can get two easily and have almost gotten three.
