“This is where we started simplifying,” Kedar explained in a 2008 interview with Wired. The company decided that adding too much visual flair would ultimately turn out to be restrictive. Of course, none of the logos above made the cut. The top two examples even use Catull, the typeface Google used in the logo for over a decade. The basic color scheme is there, albeit with some minor edits.

These designs show things falling into place. Many of them used imagery to express core components of the Google experience, such as a target to evoke its precision or a magnifying glass to signify that it was indeed a search engine. Kedar produced several different concepts for the new version of the logo. By the late 1990s, she was installed as a member of the art faculty at Stanford. Page and Brin decided to call upon the services of designer Ruth Kedar, who made her name creating widely lauded sets of playing cards. Intelligent designĪs Google grew in notoriety, the decision was made to upgrade its branding.

If you travel back in time by searching for “Google in 1998,” you’ll see it featured as part of a special throwback interface. While it’s long since been replaced as Google’s primary branding, this logo is surprisingly still in use. Like its predecessor, this iteration uses the Baskerville Bold typeface, but tweaks the 3D effect on the lettering, and adds an exclamation point - a response to Yahoo’s similar branding at that time, according to a report from Gizmodo. The color order is a little different, but that would be amended in a new version that was used from October 1998 onward. GoogleĪs you can see, several elements of the now-familiar design are already in place. Once the pair decided to launch Google officially, Brin whipped up a better design himself using the popular open-source image editor GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). In its defense, this logo was only put in place while the search engine was still a research project carried out by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. Likely created using one of the standalone 3D text generators sold in the 1990s, it’s a real reminder of just how ugly the early days of the internet could be. The very first version of the Google logo was never going to win any design awards.

If you’re feeling nostalgic or simply curious about the brand’s visual timeline, here’s a look back at how the Google logo has changed over the last 20 years.

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