Google Logo History: The Colours, Typefaces and Evolution Since 1998

A research project needs a name

Before Google was a company it was a Stanford research project, and in 1998 it needed a face. The earliest public wordmark was multicoloured and slightly bouncy, and it ended with an exclamation mark, a punctuation habit shared with other web names of the time. Google was formally incorporated as a company in September 1998.

That version is now a novelty item. For its 25th birthday in 2023, the Google Store offered a tote bag printed with the 1998 logo. It looks charmingly amateur today, with uneven spacing and heavy shadows that give the letters a raised, almost plastic finish, the kind of effect that early web graphics loved.

A small digression. The same year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin put a stick figure behind the second o to tell visitors they were away at the Burning Man festival. That doodle started a tradition of redrawing the logo for occasions, and it only works because the letters stay recognizable underneath every illustration.

Ruth Kedar and the 1999 serif

In 1998 Page and Brin approached Ruth Kedar, a designer teaching at Stanford, to design a proper logo. There was no formal brief, she has said, only long conversations about what kind of company they wanted to build. Her finished design went live on the homepage in May 1999 and lasted, with refinements, until 2015.

Kedar chose Catull, a serif typeface with traditional roots but unusually light and precise lines. In her account, search is where past and future meet: you look for old knowledge to act on tomorrow. A typeface that nodded to tradition while looking forward suited that idea. The exclamation mark was dropped along the way.

The colours in Google logo history

The colours are the part of Google logo history people remember best. Kedar started from the primary colours, red, blue and yellow, because they appear on children’s building blocks and toys, and she wanted the logo to feel like play. Plenty of people in 1999 were nervous of computers; play was meant to lower the stakes.

Then she broke the sequence. The letters run blue, red, yellow, blue, green, red, so the green L interrupts an otherwise primary pattern. Kedar has said the mixed order showed that the company did not follow established rules. Twenty-five years and several redesigns later, that order of colours is the most stable element of the identity.

If you want to see why the clash works, the colour theory guide covers how primaries and a single secondary interact. The short version: the eye reads the green as a deliberate accent rather than a mistake, because everything around it is so regular. A logo can afford exactly one rule-breaker, and this one has it.

Evolution of the Catull logo, 2010 to 2013

The evolution between 1999 and 2015 was mostly a matter of finish. In 2010 the logo was refreshed with a new, softer shading effect on the letters. It was a period when nearly every interface still imitated physical materials, with glossy buttons and drop shadows that suggested objects you could pick up.

On September 19, 2013, Google flattened it. The shading and drop shadow disappeared, the colours were slightly adjusted, and the letters sat on the page as plain coloured shapes. The change arrived with a redesigned search homepage and app launcher bar. It also anticipated what was coming two years later, when the serif itself would go.

The 2015 redesign and its evolution into a system

On September 1, 2015, Google introduced a new identity built for phones, watches, car screens and voice. Designers from across the company had met in New York for a week-long sprint. Their aim was a logo that could shrink to a tiny icon, move when Google was listening, and stay consistent across products.

The answer was three elements. The logotype moved to a custom geometric sans serif that combined, in Google’s words, mathematical purity with the simplicity of schoolbook letter printing. A four-colour G served small spaces. And four dots, one per colour, could animate to show listening, thinking or replying. The tilted e survived the change deliberately.

A companion typeface, Product Sans, was drawn for product names so they would not compete with the logotype. The team also boosted the red, green and yellow, because neighbouring colours in the small G blend optically and look duller. The typography basics guide explains the difference between a logotype and a font.

The 2025 gradient G in Google logo history

The newest chapter of Google logo history concerns only the icon. In May 2025 the Google Search app began showing a brighter G whose four colours blend into one another as a gradient rather than meeting at hard edges. The Gemini spark received the same treatment in June. Most people noticed it on their phone first.

On September 29, 2025, Google announced that the gradient G now represents the whole company, both brand and business, and that it would spread to more products over the following months. The company linked the brighter colours to AI-driven work across its services. It was the first change to the G in ten years.

Google logo history as a lesson in restraint

Set the versions side by side and the evolution is surprisingly narrow. The typeface changed once, from serif to sans. The finish changed with fashion, shaded then flat then glowing. The colour order never changed. That is less frequent change than many brands manage, as the logo redesign frequency report shows.

As of 2026 the wordmark itself is still the flat 2015 logotype in solid colours, while the gradient sits on the icon. Whether the gradient eventually reaches the six letters of the full name is the obvious open question. For comparison with other famous logos, few have kept a palette this exact for this long.