Google's new favicon
They’re the most recognisable, known and trusted brand on the internet, and they’ve just done some incredibly stupid marketing. Google have changed their favicon.
What’s a favicon? It’s short for ‘favourites icon’, and it’s the icon that sits next to the URL in your browser and identifies a website in your favourites/bookmarks as well as in tabs.
It used to look like this: 
. This was a good design, using the first letter of their logo and incorporating the red blue and green colours used in their logo (curiously omitting yellow) on a white background. If you were presented with this without knowing which brand it belonged to, you could quite easily attribute it correctly.
Now, they’ve changed it to this: . It’s not obvious, so I’ll point it out: this is the 4th letter of Google’s logo, which just so happens to be the first letter in lower case. A truly bizarre choice. This logo does nothing to portray to the user what brand the website belongs to, and is completely inconsistent with Google’s brand. Even the grey gradient in the background and the rounded corners present inconsistencies with the rest of Google’s brand. Quite frankly, it’s just worse in every way.
The design of this tiny 16x16 pixel logos may seem relatively trivial, but it does have a large effect on users. It’s the logo you look for when you’re looking for a bookmark to click on. It’s the logo you look for when you’re looking for a tab to go back to (for those of us who use tabbed browsing). Now that it’s changed, customers who are used to looking for the old one will have to adjust to the new one. But most importantly it’s a part of Google’s brand, and it’s no longer a consistent brand.
