Google logo change shows growth, reflects changing times

Shira Kaplan, Contributing Writer

The following is an opinion article, and opinion articles do not reflect the views of The Tulane Hullabaloo.

Google has changed its logo. They have strayed from the familiar lettering recognizable for as long as we can remember. With its immaculate white page and starkly contrasting letters, the classic Google homepage was something everyone came to know, inherent to the internet itself. But change is not always a bad thing and a simple logo change should not elicit the sheer rage that it has. Simply put, get over it.

Yes, the Google homepage has changed, just like it has before. In fact, it probably won’t be the last time.

For those who, for some unearthly reason, have not been on the homepage, the logo has gone sans-serif. For you normal humans who do not have any idea what these funky words mean:

Sans (preposition): without, lacking

Serif (noun): protruding lines in fonts found in Times New Roman

Google has waved goodbye to its classy, kempt look and switched to a more fridge letters aesthetic.

Personally, I feel that this new Google challenges our boundaries as creatures of habit. After some research and a perusal on the Google Blog, I discovered the answer.

In short: Google explained that it has evolved since its inception and is modernizing its look and interactivity. After reading this, it started to make more sense. Nothing magical happens in our comfort zone. Life is pretty boring if nothing changes every once in a while. Maybe Google felt that we had become relaxed and complacent in its familiarity and decided we lazy humans needed a good ol’ shock to the system.

For something to remain relevant, it must evolve and adapt. We need a switch-up, something to keep us on our toes. This change can be a sneaky brain exercise: keeping your mind sharp surreptitiously. So I choose to embrace the change and bask in the glory of its freshness and foreignness.

The sort of surprising thing about this little change up is that how angry people are. Sarah Larson at The New Yorker, for example, wants this new Google to be the failure that New Coke was.  What makes an accomplished writer squirm and recoil from simple new branding? Being plucked from her comfort zone and thrust into an aesthetically new world. As mentioned, we humans are too comfortable with what we have — it’s time to deal with it.

I have advice for those of you who are less open-minded about small modifications: be patient. Give it some time. New ideas sometimes take a while to sweep aside the dusty shelves of our habits. In the larger sense of things, we are humans, built to adjust, darn it! Take a moment and decide to adapt to changes in your life. Become a chameleon human. Embrace that new Google homepage. And maybe find something in the experience that you can apply to your larger, everyday life.

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