Remember back in September 2015 when Google changed its main company logo? The one everyone recognizes the world over shifted from that familiar typeface with serifs to a clean, geometric sans-serif font called Product Sans.
That refresh also brought us the circular, four-colored "G" icon. It had those four solid color sections: blue, red, yellow, and green, making it easy to spot Google products and services across different devices. Ten years on, the Mountain View giant has apparently decided it is time for a visual refresh for that iconic 'G' icon. This comes after the recent report that Microsoft is exploring redesigning its icons for applications like Word and Excel, moving toward a more three-dimensional style.
The new version of the 'G' icon looks quite similar at first glance, but has a key difference in its color. Instead of the distinct, solid blocks of blue, red, yellow, and green, the colors now gently bleed into one another through gradients. Red fades into yellow, yellow flows into green, and green transitions softly into blue.
The new Google 'G' icon has already started showing up in the wild. It is currently present in the Google Search app on iOS (spotted by 9To5Google), appearing there after an update yesterday. It also came to Android today with the Google app version 16.18 (beta).
At the time of writing, Google has not made any statement regarding the logo update, so we are unsure of the specific reasons for the change or the company's full plans for rolling it out across its services. We also don't know if this gradient style will come to replace the 'quad-color' style that Google has used for many of its other product icons (like Maps and Drive) over time.
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