Struggling search engine almost copies Guardian Unlimited style
Google must have had some feedback about its dull and horribly weak-looking new favicon, which is no doubt appearing in a browser tab very near you. The Official google Blog has put up a not-very-spirited defense. This points out that they hadn't changed it in 8.5 years -- yeah, that's a really good reason for making something worse.
Google also says: "The design process we went through was rigorous and interesting". In other words, "we screwed it up, but a lot of people did a lot of work to make sure we screwed it up really thoroughly." This is known in the industry as "the Microsoft defence".
Another good excuse is: "we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone". So trying to look good on a couple of million phones is a good reason for looking terrible on a billion desktops and notebooks? Would you like to take a vote on that?
The clincher is that the blog shows a whole panel of variations, which just goes to show that a monkey could have picked a better favicon with a pin.
Still, I shouldn't really complain about Google using a lower case g as a favicon, because the Guardian already uses a lower case g as a favicon. I should be grateful that they have made their's look worse than ours ;-)
Coming next week: Google changes its name to Giggle and puts small ads all over its front page. "We hadn't changed it in 8.5 years!!!"
