Schweitz Design

The Google holiday logos are pretty well documented, but the above really caught my eye. In lieu of gussying up the wordmark today, the above supplants it to celebrate the anniversary of the patenting of the bar code. (Read more about that here.)

As I stated above, today’s bar code image in place of the typical Google lettering is really eye catching. It also showcases Google’s ability to leverage their brand power. Can you name any other company that is quite frankly ballsy enough to totally remove their logo from their homepage? Even the past holiday iterations of the logo have at least been drawn up around the existing logo type. I really applaud Google for going “full-tilt” with this particular occasion logo.

Having said that, I also think Google has a bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to boldly abandoning their logo because of their ubiquitous brand position. Regardless of which logo, if any even, would be displayed on it, the Google homepage is near universally recognizable. So long as the image fits the general proportions where the logo would typically be, I surmise you could put anything in that area and the whole page would still read as Google. In this instance I really like that they chose to fore go any of the recognizable characters from their mark, as they could have potentially intertwined the wordmark and bar code imagery in a countless number of ways, retaining the more typical Google holiday sensibilities, but they didn’t. Despite the unfair advantage, I think this is really well conceived and well executed.

See more holiday iterations @ http://www.google.com/intl/en/holidaylogos.html