It’s on every design blog and tech site so I won’t bore you with a rash of personal opinion, but not to mention it on a logo blog seems daft.

Google, the multi billion uber company launched a new logo to be seen across it’s properties and that will be most notable on it’s web based search pages.

The design direction won’t come as any surprise, building on the good work Google has done recently on Material Design. As a company, it’s felt to me that for a long time that engineering came before design, but over the last couple of years that seems to have changed.

The logo then, that’s been all serif’d up since it’s inception in 1998 and has been pretty much untouched since it took on a bookish weighted serif since 1999, bar a few colour changes and tweaks. It famously takes on all comers with the Google Doodle that literally does anything to the logo. As such for recognition, it seems perhaps it’s not the logo or the colours that do the job, but maybe the name or perhaps the generally stark search page.

The new design keeps the blue, red, yellow and green colours but dresses them on a very geometric custom font. The letters, bar the ‘l’ are formed from circles, which makes the G look a bit large. The ‘e’ retains it’s quirky angle, which is really the only nod to the former letter shapes.

The look follows plenty of other big tech companies in simplifying and flattening their logos, eBay, PayPal, Logitech and Microsoft have all taken this direction recently.

That’s enough for many to moan about the change, that it’s not original or it’s too simple. Which I guess it can be accused of. But it sits within the wider push at Google for better design, were the serif logo didn’t sit all that well, even if it had lots of value from 15 years of use.

The truth is the Google logo was never that great, or pretty or suitable. It’s equity stuck well but it was difficult to shorten in a favicon type way or app icon, which I guess is why we saw the lowercase g featuring on Google apps such as Google+.

We get a new hero uppercase G and icons with the 4 key colours too.

Once we’ve seen the new logo for a few days or weeks, I assume we’ll get used to it. If there’s one  thing I might miss, it’s the double story g. I like double story g’s.