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Programming Google

Go Programming Language Gets A New Logo and Branding (golang.org) 120

After an "extensive design process," the Go programming language has a "new look and logo," according to Google's lead for Go developer relations, product, and strategy. (Promising that this won't affect Go's gopher mascot.) Our logo follows the brand's core philosophy of simplicity over complexity... 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... In addition to our brand guide we have also developed a presentation theme. This presentation theme will enable us to have a consistent representation of Go in person at meetups and conferences as well as online.

Go community members are welcome to use this theme for their own presentations. The presentations are available as Google Slides presentations. We chose Google Slides as it is easy to share and maintain updates. People are welcome to port them to keynote, PowerPoint, etc. Like this blog and all our gopher images, the slide themes are Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licensed... The brand guide, logo and themes are copyrighted by the Go authors. The brand guide contains the guidelines for acceptable logo use.

It's been more than eight years since the language's launch, and "we wanted the Go brand to reflect where we have been and convey where we are going."
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Go Programming Language Gets A New Logo and Branding

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  • what the f- (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Ayano ( 4882157 )
    Seriously... they cobbled all of that together for a piece of vector art?
    • Well they use really thin letters and their infographics are up to modern standards. And there's a big curly brace. So I guess all is in order.
      • Gotta love that thin blue diagonal line on the red background too (page 4).

        If there was like a place called Jaggie City or something that piece of shit would totally be the mayor.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by hagnat ( 752654 )

      its not just a vector art. Its a piece of the identify of a brand, and how you should you use.
      that's how a proper brand guide should look like. I take it you never worked with one.

      • +5 informative.

      • Yes, such a brand guide seems wholly appropriate for billion dollar companies and their top products, when you have a dedicated and expensive marketing team to coordinate in their job of actively promoting a brand with an actual marketing budget, all designed to sell more products or affect public perception.

        For a free and open source programming language, though, it feels ridiculously overblown. The amount of design hipster-ism that's oozes from this document is completely absurd. In short, this is reall

      • by zabbey ( 985424 )
        trying to justify your bullshit job. whatever you gotta do to keep them suckers paying you.
      • If their idea is to promote a language that "follows the brand's core philosophy of simplicity over complexity", shouldn't they be using this [wikimedia.org] as their logo? That has good brand recognition and has been around for years.

        Another suggestion for a logo for Go would be this [signsworldwide.com].

    • The graphic with it's action lines reminds me of a book read to me as a child called Go Dog, Go
      https://images.gr-assets.com/b... [gr-assets.com]

  • Marketing? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dawn Keyhotie ( 3145 ) on Saturday April 28, 2018 @10:46AM (#56519329)

    What am I even reading here? It's a computer language, not a car.

    If a language needs its own marketing department, from a multi-billion-dollar company, then maybe it's not that great in the first place.

    • If a language needs its own marketing department, from a multi-billion-dollar company, then maybe it's not that great in the first place.

      [1] [oracle.com]

      • by Junta ( 36770 )

        I don't know your intent, but you may be bolstering their claim rather than countering it ;)

    • Re:Marketing? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lucm ( 889690 ) on Saturday April 28, 2018 @11:16AM (#56519461)

      maybe it's not that great in the first place.

      It is my experience that apps written in Go have amazing performance. But it's also my experience that coding in Go is a huge pain in the ass. Granted, I didn't spend a billion hours RTFM but when compilation fails because of unused imports or because the opening curly brace of "if" is on the following line, I would say it's garbage not warranting further effort.

      • These specific problems are handled by go. `go dep` will fix issues with dependencies, adding and subtracting to provide only to what the code uses. (NB: I don't know what it does when referenced modules are not locally installed.) `go fmt` will reformat code to meet the requirements stipulated by the language.

        My knee jerk reaction when I discovered the draconian rules that govern code formatting was that the designers had gone overboard. Then I realized that ends the arguments about formatting, indentation

    • by jabberw0k ( 62554 ) on Saturday April 28, 2018 @11:17AM (#56519467) Homepage Journal
      Quick, what's the logo for C, Pascal, FORTRAN, or BASIC? Countries have flags and seals; languages don't.
      • by hagnat ( 752654 )

        java, php, python, ruby, c++, and many others (even pascal) have logo's
        just because you don't see or use them often, doesn't mean there aren't

      • Quick, what's the logo for C, Pascal, FORTRAN, or BASIC? Countries have flags and seals; languages don't.

        If you asked what the logo for Perl is everyone would be able to answer.

    • Re:Marketing? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday April 28, 2018 @12:45PM (#56519855) Homepage Journal

      That's kind of naive. The best language to program in is the one that has the most brainshare. It's where the jobs are and where posting a job will find the greatest pool of candidates.

      Marketing isn't just about creating manipulative communication, although that's part of it. It's the practical study of how to exploit human economic behavior.

  • Great news! (Score:5, Funny)

    by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Saturday April 28, 2018 @10:47AM (#56519331)

    You know, whenever anybody asked me what I thought the biggest thing holding back the Go language was, the first thing that came to mind was the logo. This is truly an earth-shattering development.

    • I'd kill for a parody of that brand guide, but rewritten for C++. Remove all the feel-good platitudes about "our values" (or perhaps replace with a discussion of l-values and r-values) and be completely blunt about how convoluted, complicated, and plain screwed up the language is, while yet it still somehow remains both popular and useful in actual production environments.

    • You know, whenever anybody asked me what I thought the biggest thing holding back the Go language was, the first thing that came to mind was the logo.

      I know you're trying to make a joke, but you actually hit the nail on the head. Go's branding was shite and actually *was* the biggest caveat holding it back. I bet dollars to donuts that usage of Go will rise measurably after this. Seriously. Not joking.

  • by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Saturday April 28, 2018 @11:25AM (#56519505) Homepage Journal

    Page 8:

    These segments has different priorities and varying understanding of Go's value and purpose

    They does, does they? Who wrote this shit, Popeye?

    I suppose writing properly isn't *humble*, and might be considered *reactive*, *exclusive* or *haughty*. (Page 7).

    • by chrish ( 4714 )

      Marketing departments don't generally employ technical writers, and they're not usually interested in getting reviews from outside of their weird bubble.

      My first thought was that Gollum wrote that, but Popeye might somehow be more appropriate for Google...

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Thought this was a delayed April Fool's stunt. This logo is really, really bad. But also not surprising, since Google seems to be where terrible, tone-deaf designers get jobs to make the rest of us suffer.

  • Looks like the logo of a transit agency... or maybe a gas station.

  • Usual joke (Score:5, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday April 28, 2018 @12:21PM (#56519767)

    "Go Programming Language Gets A New Logo and Branding "

    'Go' is now named 'Went' and will soon be named 'Gone'.

  • Uses 'infer' instead of 'imply', which implies that it was written by illiterates. Or at least, one might infer so.

    Having used go in production, it needs a nice logo and some comprehensive and coherent brand directions, because it certainly won't get anywhere on technical merits alone.

  • I wish someone makes an alternate language for the Go ecosystem. I like Go libraries: high-level, scripting grade API. I just don't care for the Go language itself. There is an alternate language called Have, but it does not look interesting either. I would like to see something like Nim for the Go ecosystem, or perhaps a Go backend for Nim.

  • I prefer the Go Gopher mascot. A fat gopher makes a better t-shirt than the word "Go" in a generic looking font.

    Tux the penguin. Beastie the BSD daemon, Puffy the OpenBSD pufferfish, and Glenda the Plan 9 Bunny.

    These are mascots that continue to be loved by their user communities. If we have to be so straight laced and professional that we can't enjoy a whimsical mascot then I don't think I'm really the target audience anymore and I expect my path and the Go communities path to start to diverge.

    • Hopefully they retain the gopher as a mascot. It seems like that is their plan.

      • So they said in the press release, "Rest easy, our beloved Gopher Mascot remains at the center of our brand." But it feels like a mixed message to me.

        Now that I've calmed down I will still be using Go. It's a very practical language. Sure, it oversold on its capabilities, so must lower the expectations built up by the hype. Is Go a great concurrency language? No, not really compared to Erlang/Elixir's environment. Does Go fix trade some of the design decisions of C and generally improve on it? Subjective, b

  • Is what failing companioes do. Companies are businesses, not brands.

"The most important thing in a man is not what he knows, but what he is." -- Narciso Yepes

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