Designing good logos is maybe one of the hardest things in the world to do. It may look easy, but it’s not. I’ve heard that even the best logo designers in the world have only a couple of true hits at best.

Personally, I’ve been involved in several projects requiring us to pick a good logo. I can’t say at any time that I’ve been involved in a project where we really got it right. The closest might be the current Bakersfield.com logo.

Have you ever thought how wonderful the Google logo is? It is memorable, playful, reflecting the simplicity and the product (a fast, slimmed down, realiable search engine (something not available on the web when Google was launched), and stands apart from any of the technology market leaders.

The logo is so deceptively simple, you may think Sergy and Larry simply got a box of crayons out one night and whipped it up.

Ruth Kedar, who was teaching design at Standford in 1999, explains the great deal of thought that went into the logo.

In the end this particular logo was selected because it reached its goal in many levels:

• It was playful and deceptively simple. The design subtle as to look almost non-designed, the reading effortless. The colors evoke memories of child play, but deftly stray from the color wheel strictures so as to hint to the inherent element of serendipity creeping into any search results page and the irreverance and boldness of the “I am feeling lucky” link. The texture and shading of each letter is done in an unobtrusive way resulting in lifting it from the page while giving it both weight and lightness. It is solid but there is also an ethereal quality to it.
• Times-Roman was the font of choice for the web at that time, while sans-serif fonts were the darling of the printed world. I wanted the readability of a serifed font, but looked for a typeface that had the same qualities we were looking for – subtly sophisticated, but with some humor and irreverence . The chosen typeface is a based on Catull, an old style serif typeface. Catull borrows elements from traditional writing instruments such as the quill and the chisel with a modern twist. Search, by nature, is an activity that requires we look into the past. Therefore Catull’s historical ties seemed appropriate, as did the bridging between the old analog world and the new emerging digital era.
• Visually, there were two main schools of thought at the time: those wanting to emulate the conventional non-web giants such as Sun and SGI (bold all-caps sans-serifed fonts), and those who viewed the irreverence of Yahoo’s non-designed approach as “the look” for the new medium. This design managed to break with the existing conventions landing Google with the unique visual expression it was looking for.

Is that incredible?