When a New G Passed the Squint Test

As a UX program manager, Gaja Sidrys Caple helps UX teams focus on their craft and systematize designs across the company. By partnering with engineers and planning plenty of design sprints, she drives cross-team conversations about everything from research to accessibility requirements.

Here — as part of our celebration of a decade of Material Design — Gaja shares a memory of a landmark design moment in the process of rebooting the Google Logo + Identity Family.

My first assignment on the newly formed Material Design team was GLIF, the Google Logo + Identity Family. GLIF was a nine-month project that started off with Material Design and Creative Lab. There were maybe ten designers and a lot of execs involved. It started small, and then we realized that we needed to expand. So we brought in the Search team, and they partnered with us to test out how these changes would look in real products.

Google’s identity wasn’t just for desktop anymore but also for mobile, wearables, and smart devices, as well as much larger surfaces, such as billboards. When developing the new identity, we had many more considerations than with the original Google mark. Beyond needing to work in a lot of different places and at different sizes, it also had to work with motion, have a recognizable typeface, retain its friendliness, and load wildly fast on any device. A lot went into it.

One part of the creative process was choosing and testing color. The team would do a squint test — blurring the logos to check if they were still recognizably Google at a glance. At the time, the old favicon seemed classic and unchangeable. It was a humble lowercase g on a blue background. But when it was blurred, it didn’t look or feel like Google, especially when compared to some of the four-color options the team was cooking up.

The final logo included a four-color, sans serif capital G. We nicknamed it the Super G. One of my favorite facts is that the guy who proposed the Super G in the first concept round — his last name is Gugel, pronounced like Google! Once it was clear that the Super G was a final contender, Designer Jesse Kaczmarek made some last refinements, but Andy Gugel was the one who started it. And of course there was a whole team of people who contributed along the way.

With GLIF, I got to know every single UX program manager at the company. Part of my role was to meet with every product team, explain the changes, and show them where to find the new logos and how to request new assets. One of the biggest challenges was working with them to find all the places where existing Google logos were used across every product. It was like a scavenger hunt. Everyone was doing things differently, which led us to make a centralized library of assets and a standard way of using them in the codebase. In all, the team created at least 10,000 individual assets, ensuring the Google logo and icons were pixel-perfect at any size.

The processes of redesigning and systematizing were intense but rewarding. The launch felt incredibly impactful — especially that first day when all the old signs were taken off the buildings in Mountain View and replaced with the new logo we’d been working on all those months. Seeing them made the whole thing feel real. I can’t remember another project that was such a cross-company effort. Everyone had to work together to support that launch.