I'm surprised it's still being used (and a mod fixed the link now), but if you're curious, here's the discussion on 9m.no from 15 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7783239 :)
> While Google hasn't released the optimized 305 byte logo and it doesn't seem to be available online, I believe that they got the size down to 305 bytes as they claim.
Where do Google claim it is 305 bytes? There's no link provided. AFAICT there's no references in this article.
Clearly, though, this is not how Google did it. For example, their blog post, https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident... , states that the upper case G is not just a circle, but slightly modified to make it more visually appealing.
I meant it differs visually. I suppose it's possible Google has a different looking G for a compressed variant, but that would just be even more odd from a branding perspective.
Does the size savings matter in comparison to the effort needed to identify (URL) and download the file? I mean to say, is this purely an exercise in graphics optimization or will Google see practical costs savings?
The savings is for the users who are on extremely low bandwidth systems in markets they are trying to break into. 305 bytes is going to download a lot faster than 14kb, which I believe is what they said their old standard logo was. Even the 2kb svg mentioned in the article would be slower.
This reminds me of Paul Prescod's article from 2003 which specifically used Google's landing page as an example of performance improvements that could be obtained by a judicious use of SVG:
Real reason for the redesign. Works for every screen. Loads fast. Aesthetic component is important but not so important. This is a real marriage of art and science for logos.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 78.0 ms ] threadThat said, shouldn't the link be directly to the article instead of through a URL shortener?
Where do Google claim it is 305 bytes? There's no link provided. AFAICT there's no references in this article.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/svg-prescod.html
I wonder how this philosophy will hold up as the years drip by?
Without even a link to or mention of the original source.