The Go gopher is a redraw of Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny. Many of Plan 9's principals worked on Go, which is itself an update of Alef, Plan 9's planned systems language, before it was canned and replaced with C.
I'm sure he'll still be around as a mascot. He's still on the site's main page. I really don't see the problem with him -- most commercial internet servers run a kernel with a cute penguin mascot, and many of the rest run a kernel with a cute mascot who is literally the Devil -- but I can appreciate the strategy of opening with a punchy, barebones logotype.
Was it really a redraw of the Plan 9 bunny? According to the Go website it says the gopher was created for a radio station fund raiser.
About 15 years ago—long before the Go project—the gopher first appeared as a promotion for the WFMU radio station in New Jersey. Renee French was commissioned to design a T-shirt for an annual fundraiser and out came the gopher.
It's probably silly but I like it when logos/mascots are like that—you know, slightly helpless and not oozing of focused branding efforts. It makes me feel more certain that the language/technology is used because of its actual merits rather than its branding.
Sleek new logo makes it look like a bicycle renting start up. While I think its good to refresh branding and aim to unify more things, I will miss the Go Gopher.
The rebranding might make the language look sleeker and more enterprisey but it looks that they're rejecting their spirit of playfulness in order to appeal to the likes of Oracle clients and take away more Java mindshare.
I think this gets too many downvotes. Yes, static vs dynamic typing. Yes, imperative vs functional language. On the other hand, CSP is conceptually fairly close to the Actor Model, so there are definitely similarities. I've written go code that looks similar to Erlang (a go routine receiving messages from an `interface{}` channel in a for loop and then dispatching based on the type.
I am not a branding expert, and that's a good thing, because it took a full 5 minutes to really figure out what the heck they are doing here. They wanted something "Simple & Speed" to be associated with Go which are certainly attributes of Go I have read about.
Eh, I'm really not feeling this. I mean, I just really loved that silly little cartoon gopher and his goofy little eyes. It had a personality.
This is something that really irritates me about Google and their products, services, "stuff" if you will. Their branding is contemporary but at the same time has absolutely no excitement or personality to it. I mean, it's till contemporary, it still uses interesting colors and stuff, but they strip away all personality from everything that they do in the interest of appealing to a worldwide audience.
Whatever, joke's on them, I'm going to vehemently deny that this new brand exists. I'm not going to let a branding agency ruin things for me.
To be fair, the gopher does appear on their branding in place, just not where the blog post has shown.
The agency page for their work on Go features an updated gopher graphic, and I think the home page looks quite nice. The branding booklet looks like standard agency stuff, but if they were to use the gopher a bit more I could get behind it.
Looks like they are loosing the bespoke Go fonts (https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts) and going with Work Sans and Roboto. I understand the reasoning.
Personally, I have a big soft spot in my heart for the go fonts . Whenever I feel like coding like it's 1979 again, I load them up in my editor and pretend I'm looking at well written documentation from my childhood.
[edit: Yay, Go fonts remain for source code display!]
Heh. I stopped at page 18 of the new styleguide at the body font section . So the Go font remains the official font for the display of source code. Yay!!
They kept the gopher. But they provide a model sheet.
"The gopher is not a logo.
However, when appropriate,
it can and should be used on
communications that are Go
branded, but should not be used in
place of our logo, nor should it be
placed too closely around the logo,
so as to infer it's an alternate logo."
Always! People underestimate the subliminal effects of good design. In the early days of Slack, several people I know (not in tech) were practically begging to use it at their workplace. The reason? The branding was "mesmerizing," particularly the hash. I think the same goes for programming languages.
Languages do need to develop a critical mass of resources related to them, people need to provide services for them, and you do want to identify which ones are official. For that purpose, a brand identity is going to be helpful. (At least as helpful as a brand can be.)
In a nutshell, it's about ensuring people can distinguish between golang.org and w3schools.com.
I think that though Python is popular independent of its branding, it definitely has a strong branding system, just less explicitly stated as go's. Their font is quite iconic, and their logo and colors more so: https://www.python.org/community/logos/
Everything is about impression and perception. For example, I have observed that people treat me more seriously when I dress better than with the typical "jeans+tshirt" combo.
Now, we can say this is superficial bullshit, but at the end of the day, the way you dress influence people's perception of you.
So in my opinion, Go's new branding give it a more "serious" image and perhaps people unfamiliar with the language will be more inclined to consider it.
Again, it's superficial bullshit, but it is what it is.
In this case the cliché brand identity is the jeans and t-shirt combo. Does hip branding not make a language seem juvenile? You talk about serious image, but surely you can't find more serious languages than those devoid of branding, like C and Lisp.
at start I actually had doubts on go due to the mascot and the naming, like Go -> Google, they name it after the company, another thing they expect to put google in front of it and we have to love it.
This makes me incredibly (to me) sad. The identity is so completely soulless, and the logo is the opposite of timeless, trying to grasp currently oh so hip and pop retro aesthetic. Nevermind that the retro logo and super sleek modern visual identity seems to clash with each other, both are abandoning the playfulness that was so prevalent before, most clearly evident in the various Go gopher illustrations.
And its not that the designs here are bad in isolation; overall the visual identity is very sleek, and I could imagine it working well for something else; RedHat and JetBrains are the first things that come to mind. But for Go, this logo is the one that I acknowledge:
This is true of ANY good logo before it gets traction.
There's nothing special about the Apple logo (or Apple as the name of a corporate name), for example. I mean, seriously, it's a clip art apple with a bit out of it.
What makes it a great logo is everything in your head and heart that is associated, good or bad, with that image.
I'd agree here. It's like they tried to make the new branding as generic as they possibly could.
I liked the simple, basic site that Go has always used. It seems inevitable that they'll redo the site, to include megabytes of JavaScript for features that nobody wants, like hijacked scrolling. (The site[0] for the design agency they talk about loads about 3 MB. Almost none of it is images. The site loads all that to display approximately ten words.)
Also,
>The circular shape of the letters hints at the eyes of the Go gopher, creating a familiar shape and allowing the mark and the mascot to pair well together.
If by "pairing well together", you mean not going together in any way, then yes.
It's like they tried to tick every box in the "obnoxious and annoying" category:
* It's inexplicably large
* It's slow af
* Scroll hijacking
* back button hijacking
* There's elements that appear when I scroll, but they disappear so you don't actually appear to be able to look them any more than in passing. (Notably the colourful logos for Google and Priceline).
* Did I mention it's slow? Scrolling is slow. Clicking on things is slow. Animations are slow.
* ~Half the code isn't even minified and a coworker pointed out that some of it doesn't appear to even be used.~ Nevermind, some of it does appear to be minified/resized.
* 3.8+ Megabytes of JS, really? Really really? Why?
I like the part where dragging on my phone scrolls the page the opposite of the direction I'm dragging.
I think this happens when I drag one direction, then change my mind and drag the other, and the site (sorry, "app") forgets to forget my previous drag.
I am so utterly infuriated at their incompetence. How could they not see these obvious points? I hope they're reading because they ruined the face of an otherwise, very cool programming language project in our times.
but Adidas had plenty of soul in the 80s. RunDMC wrote an anthem specifically about the brand [0], which completely changed the Hip Hop's relationship w/ commerce.
As someone who uses Go everyday -- professionally and personally -- Go's branding was always simple and fun, which (to me) was reflected in the language itself. The new proposal is trendy, but Go was never about being trendy -- Go as a language explicitly rejects so many trendy features from other languages. Go to me is simple, fast, fun, and doesn't change a whole lot (a very good thing).
Most of the Gophers I know, myself included, are a little weird and different -- in a good way. So was the branding. I liked that... and I'm going to miss that.
Look at it this way, Google's making a commercial statement with this, that they think Go is important enough for them to brand.
It's like Duke and Java -- Duke still exists as a mascot. I suspect the gopher will be around for a long time to come. If anything this is a harbinger of Go becoming more mainstream than it is already (think TIOBE top-10).
No, this all started with an email to UX/design of "I want a professionally designed slide deck for this talk I am giving" and they sent it off to an agency.
There is no way self respecting Googlers were involved in this shit show.
Ya, same here. To me, the gopher was the logo - I didn't even know if they had a separate logo or not, and never bothered. I mean, when you have one like the gopher, why do you need anything else?
I think you might have been confused by the fact that the new logo is basically just a polished-up version of the original one. Were you expecting the gopher at that URL?
Yes, I was expecting the gopher, especially because of the URL's path including the word gopher. Looking at the wayback machine shows you're right, this is the same picture that's been at that URL for years. I just always thought of the gopher as their logo, didn't realize there was another logo they used (I don't use Go so not too familiar with it).
- it ham-fistedly plays on the name Go (look, the logo is "going"...)
- it is not opinionated (it conforms seamlessly to contemporary corporate logo design, it looks like stock art)
- it does not repay sustained attention
Go is a brutalist language. Clean lines, no frills, lots of power, close enough to the metal. I want monotype, exposed beams and concrete, RTFM, no ugly movement lines.
I would actually rather they had taken a photo of the word "Go" written in concrete.
And honestly, I don't care about any of these things, it's just window dressing on a very solid programming tool. It's frustrating when the miss is that obvious, though. Whoever pushed this through was clearly very risk averse, rushed, or both.
The logo also appears to have lifted several elements from the podcast Jordan, Jesse, Go [1]. The font is almost identical. It has the white text on almost the exact same shade of blue. It has the three lines trailing part of the logo.
EDIT: Here [2] are the two logos side by side. The number of similarities would make this one hell of a coincidence.
I don’t think there’s enough evidence that they’re inspired by each other.
movement lines aren’t original. they’re a classic visual archetype, commonly used to convey movement in static images. they exist in every comic book ever printed.
Sans-serif fonts in all caps consisting of two circular letters “G”and “O” can look similar, depending on who’s looking
That is unfortunate phrasing. The Jordan, Jesse, Go logo has been used for roughly a decade and the podcast is older than the Go language. There is only one possible direction that any inspiration could have flowed.
Any one or two of these specific details can be explained away, but at a certain point the number of coincidence start to indicate that they are not in fact coincidences.
But there is not enough evidence here, to suggest that the new go logo lifted elements from that other logo.
Motion lines are not a coincidence they are a common solution to the problem of conveying motion in static imagery. It’s as common as using a cup when the problem being addressed is how to drink coffee.
A sans-serif word-mark is also not unique. It’s trendy. Everyone’s doing it. The major difference between the old google logo and the current one was the removal of serifs. For a company Google’s size that’s one expensive redesign just to remove serifs, since they had to get it re-printed on everything such as cars, signs, business cards, letterhead, clothing, etc. Going with a sans-serif is not an original design choice, it’s a trendy and safe one. And sans serif texts tend to look like each other in all caps with circular letters.
Ehh. I’m trying but I’m not seeing any peculiar elements that the two logos share, including the combination of public domain design choices, to the extent that would suggest one lifted from the other.
Jordan, Jesse, Go! also immediately came to my mind when I saw these new logos. Based on the visual similarities, it seems the designer was probably inspired by the JJGO logo. This also reminded me that there was already an existing language named "Go!" when golang was released. Maybe they should add the exclamation point now to go for the full JJGO look.
In fact, a font that looked like steel or concrete might be good. Wonder if there is one. If so, they could have made the logo to be just the word Go (as I spelled it as regards to case) in that font. Silvery steel font on a gray or black background, or some similar combination.
Even a font / image / logo signifying a rugged wood (mahogany or some hardwood?) in some way might have been a good one. Signifying the Go philosophy - a no-frills, just-get-the-work done-kind of language.
Incidentally, I viewed your above URL for Google Authenticator logo images in mobile a while earlier (after being able to view it fine - with all the images - on desktop PC). And on mobile (Android), amusingly, it seems like Chrome has done its usual optimization of heavy pages (by googleweblight.com or similar means), which often helps save bandwidth and speeds the rendering time, but this time, it resulted in it optimizing out all the images that should show up on that page :) Not a single image shows up, I just get the header and footer of the page. If anyone from Google is reading this, please pass on the info to the relevant team, so they can look into this.
That's kinda hilarious but altogether probably unsurprising. With Android and Chrome using Google as the default search, I suspect the number of people who test against Bing Image Search is a small quantity. :/
Your first paragraph immediately reminded me of the logo/CI transition for one of Germany's largest hospital operators, "Helios" (subsidiary of Fresenius):
"old" logo (easily recognizable as a medical institution, easily discernible "H" for "Helios"):
> "H" not clearly discernable in the two green blobs, no reference to medicine at all
I've never seen either of these logos before, but in the new one I immediately see the "H" formed by the white space between the two "green blobs", which to me look like "healing hands" and which I take as a medical reference (although TBH they do make me think "chiropractor" rather than "doctor"). I don't think the new one is great, but I much prefer it to the old one, which looks like a very half-assed attempt to combine an H with the Rod of Asclepius. It's like they weren't even trying.
What I meant to say is that the old one is a logo that (without any text or anything) practically screams "hospital"/"medical institution" to anyone looking at it for the first time, while the new one is rather ambiguous, especially if you have no context for it.
Relevant: golang-nuts mailing list discussion from 2011 where someone claimed the logo lacked "professionalism" and was thoroughly mocked for it (including by a younger, more juvenile yours truly).
Gopher mascot and no logo was fine. I do see - I cannot call it a trend, but multiple individual instances - of companies going from a better logo / brand image to a sometimes worse one (this is purely subjective opinion on my part, of course, not based on any objective criteria at all).
Another example is Google's current logo of the company name. I don't find it attractive - flat and sort of dull. But the one they had earlier for a long time, was attractive, the colors sort of seemed to gleam or sparkle, and the overall effect was pleasing, even though the colors were the sort of primary colors you find in the kindergarten.
Note: All this said just as a guy who has no UI design expertise at all, just speaking as a layman to that field.
"Our logo follows the brand’s core philosophy of simplicity over complexity."
The logo and the philosophy behind it are the first things anyone, professional designer or not, would think of. If Go's philosophy was to implement the first thing that comes to mind, it would have generics by now :) I think they need to put a little more thought into this.
Edit: Maybe the design could could incorporate a visual representation of goroutines in some way?
300 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadThe hand drawn gopher just looked... childish? It definitely didn’t give me the impression of an efficient and well put together programming language.
It was too detailed to use as an icon, and the lines were too thin to look good when printed.
I'm sure he'll still be around as a mascot. He's still on the site's main page. I really don't see the problem with him -- most commercial internet servers run a kernel with a cute penguin mascot, and many of the rest run a kernel with a cute mascot who is literally the Devil -- but I can appreciate the strategy of opening with a punchy, barebones logotype.
https://9p.io/plan9/glenda.html
About 15 years ago—long before the Go project—the gopher first appeared as a promotion for the WFMU radio station in New Jersey. Renee French was commissioned to design a T-shirt for an annual fundraiser and out came the gopher.
I'm partial to this take on the little fella: http://reneefrench.blogspot.com/2016/11/blog-post.html
http://within.us/google-go/
Golang not well supporting supervision trees has more to do with the runtime not allowing to kill a goroutine. See http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2930
Java 1.4 already had much more features and library offerings than Go still lacks.
I'd consider languages like JavaScript, Ruby, and Python to be playful languages by comparison.
Go's branding will always be the gopher in my eyes.
This is something that really irritates me about Google and their products, services, "stuff" if you will. Their branding is contemporary but at the same time has absolutely no excitement or personality to it. I mean, it's till contemporary, it still uses interesting colors and stuff, but they strip away all personality from everything that they do in the interest of appealing to a worldwide audience.
Whatever, joke's on them, I'm going to vehemently deny that this new brand exists. I'm not going to let a branding agency ruin things for me.
The agency page for their work on Go features an updated gopher graphic, and I think the home page looks quite nice. The branding booklet looks like standard agency stuff, but if they were to use the gopher a bit more I could get behind it.
http://within.us/google-go/
Personally, I have a big soft spot in my heart for the go fonts . Whenever I feel like coding like it's 1979 again, I load them up in my editor and pretend I'm looking at well written documentation from my childhood.
[edit: Yay, Go fonts remain for source code display!]
I was a little late for 1979, but I still enjoy the aesthetic.
edit: I've been using Iosevka for a while now— which I guess a mildly similar feel, but narrower.
"The gopher is not a logo. However, when appropriate, it can and should be used on communications that are Go branded, but should not be used in place of our logo, nor should it be placed too closely around the logo, so as to infer it's an alternate logo."
Hey, they linked to a talk by Renee French about her design of the gopher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rw_B4yY69k
I doubt the gopher is either clever enough or interested enough to infer that.
Languages do need to develop a critical mass of resources related to them, people need to provide services for them, and you do want to identify which ones are official. For that purpose, a brand identity is going to be helpful. (At least as helpful as a brand can be.)
In a nutshell, it's about ensuring people can distinguish between golang.org and w3schools.com.
In fact there are old comments on HN from '05 when people lamented the loss of the old logo..
http://www.demiurgo.org/charlas/python-unittesting/img/pytho...
Now, we can say this is superficial bullshit, but at the end of the day, the way you dress influence people's perception of you.
So in my opinion, Go's new branding give it a more "serious" image and perhaps people unfamiliar with the language will be more inclined to consider it.
Again, it's superficial bullshit, but it is what it is.
And its not that the designs here are bad in isolation; overall the visual identity is very sleek, and I could imagine it working well for something else; RedHat and JetBrains are the first things that come to mind. But for Go, this logo is the one that I acknowledge:
https://blog.golang.org/gopher/logo.png
Funny thing here is that I'm don't even like Go that much, and still I had such strong negative reaction to this branding.
this sums up why this new brand isn't good.
There's nothing special about the Apple logo (or Apple as the name of a corporate name), for example. I mean, seriously, it's a clip art apple with a bit out of it.
What makes it a great logo is everything in your head and heart that is associated, good or bad, with that image.
I liked the simple, basic site that Go has always used. It seems inevitable that they'll redo the site, to include megabytes of JavaScript for features that nobody wants, like hijacked scrolling. (The site[0] for the design agency they talk about loads about 3 MB. Almost none of it is images. The site loads all that to display approximately ten words.)
Also,
>The circular shape of the letters hints at the eyes of the Go gopher, creating a familiar shape and allowing the mark and the mascot to pair well together.
If by "pairing well together", you mean not going together in any way, then yes.
[0]: http://within.us/
It's like they tried to tick every box in the "obnoxious and annoying" category:
* It's inexplicably large
* It's slow af
* Scroll hijacking
* back button hijacking
* There's elements that appear when I scroll, but they disappear so you don't actually appear to be able to look them any more than in passing. (Notably the colourful logos for Google and Priceline).
* Did I mention it's slow? Scrolling is slow. Clicking on things is slow. Animations are slow.
* ~Half the code isn't even minified and a coworker pointed out that some of it doesn't appear to even be used.~ Nevermind, some of it does appear to be minified/resized.
* 3.8+ Megabytes of JS, really? Really really? Why?
I think this happens when I drag one direction, then change my mind and drag the other, and the site (sorry, "app") forgets to forget my previous drag.
You're not missing that much, though, since there are quite literally (yes, I counted) fifteen words on the entire home page.
So true. When I look at the new logo, it reminds me of Adidas in the 1980s.
but Adidas had plenty of soul in the 80s. RunDMC wrote an anthem specifically about the brand [0], which completely changed the Hip Hop's relationship w/ commerce.
[0] — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=virlWcB_G-E
As someone who uses Go everyday -- professionally and personally -- Go's branding was always simple and fun, which (to me) was reflected in the language itself. The new proposal is trendy, but Go was never about being trendy -- Go as a language explicitly rejects so many trendy features from other languages. Go to me is simple, fast, fun, and doesn't change a whole lot (a very good thing).
Most of the Gophers I know, myself included, are a little weird and different -- in a good way. So was the branding. I liked that... and I'm going to miss that.
It's like Duke and Java -- Duke still exists as a mascot. I suspect the gopher will be around for a long time to come. If anything this is a harbinger of Go becoming more mainstream than it is already (think TIOBE top-10).
There is no way self respecting Googlers were involved in this shit show.
> https://blog.golang.org/gopher/logo.png
Check the link again. They pulled the rug out from under you.
Yes, I was expecting the gopher, especially because of the URL's path including the word gopher. Looking at the wayback machine shows you're right, this is the same picture that's been at that URL for years. I just always thought of the gopher as their logo, didn't realize there was another logo they used (I don't use Go so not too familiar with it).
- it ham-fistedly plays on the name Go (look, the logo is "going"...)
- it is not opinionated (it conforms seamlessly to contemporary corporate logo design, it looks like stock art)
- it does not repay sustained attention
Go is a brutalist language. Clean lines, no frills, lots of power, close enough to the metal. I want monotype, exposed beams and concrete, RTFM, no ugly movement lines.
I would actually rather they had taken a photo of the word "Go" written in concrete.
And honestly, I don't care about any of these things, it's just window dressing on a very solid programming tool. It's frustrating when the miss is that obvious, though. Whoever pushed this through was clearly very risk averse, rushed, or both.
EDIT: Here [2] are the two logos side by side. The number of similarities would make this one hell of a coincidence.
[1] - http://www.maximumfun.org/shows/jordan-jesse-go
[2] - https://i.imgur.com/0KkdFR1.png
movement lines aren’t original. they’re a classic visual archetype, commonly used to convey movement in static images. they exist in every comic book ever printed.
Sans-serif fonts in all caps consisting of two circular letters “G”and “O” can look similar, depending on who’s looking
no car
That is unfortunate phrasing. The Jordan, Jesse, Go logo has been used for roughly a decade and the podcast is older than the Go language. There is only one possible direction that any inspiration could have flowed.
Any one or two of these specific details can be explained away, but at a certain point the number of coincidence start to indicate that they are not in fact coincidences.
But there is not enough evidence here, to suggest that the new go logo lifted elements from that other logo.
Motion lines are not a coincidence they are a common solution to the problem of conveying motion in static imagery. It’s as common as using a cup when the problem being addressed is how to drink coffee.
A sans-serif word-mark is also not unique. It’s trendy. Everyone’s doing it. The major difference between the old google logo and the current one was the removal of serifs. For a company Google’s size that’s one expensive redesign just to remove serifs, since they had to get it re-printed on everything such as cars, signs, business cards, letterhead, clothing, etc. Going with a sans-serif is not an original design choice, it’s a trendy and safe one. And sans serif texts tend to look like each other in all caps with circular letters.
Ehh. I’m trying but I’m not seeing any peculiar elements that the two logos share, including the combination of public domain design choices, to the extent that would suggest one lifted from the other.
https://blog.golang.org/gopher/logo.png
In fact, a font that looked like steel or concrete might be good. Wonder if there is one. If so, they could have made the logo to be just the word Go (as I spelled it as regards to case) in that font. Silvery steel font on a gray or black background, or some similar combination.
Even a font / image / logo signifying a rugged wood (mahogany or some hardwood?) in some way might have been a good one. Signifying the Go philosophy - a no-frills, just-get-the-work done-kind of language.
Just thinking aloud ... :)
Nice, thanks.
"old" logo (easily recognizable as a medical institution, easily discernible "H" for "Helios"):
http://www.medical-network-hessen.de/images/News/Helios_Klin...
"new" logo ("H" not clearly discernable in the two green blobs, no reference to medicine at all):
https://www.helios-gesundheit.de/fileadmin/_processed_/d/4/c...
All in all, from quite good to meh.
I've never seen either of these logos before, but in the new one I immediately see the "H" formed by the white space between the two "green blobs", which to me look like "healing hands" and which I take as a medical reference (although TBH they do make me think "chiropractor" rather than "doctor"). I don't think the new one is great, but I much prefer it to the old one, which looks like a very half-assed attempt to combine an H with the Rod of Asclepius. It's like they weren't even trying.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/JZ-gUROf...
Another example is Google's current logo of the company name. I don't find it attractive - flat and sort of dull. But the one they had earlier for a long time, was attractive, the colors sort of seemed to gleam or sparkle, and the overall effect was pleasing, even though the colors were the sort of primary colors you find in the kindergarten.
Note: All this said just as a guy who has no UI design expertise at all, just speaking as a layman to that field.
I found it agreeable, woody, complex and balanced, with notes of ash and clover.
The logo and the philosophy behind it are the first things anyone, professional designer or not, would think of. If Go's philosophy was to implement the first thing that comes to mind, it would have generics by now :) I think they need to put a little more thought into this.
Edit: Maybe the design could could incorporate a visual representation of goroutines in some way?