Dennis Hwang designed the Gmail logo. At the time, Dennis designed virtually all of the Google doodles and he did a lot of the new logo work as well.
The logo was designed literally the night before the product launched. We were up very late and Sergey and I went down to his cube to watch him make it.
The initial version used the same font as the Google logo (Catull), but Catull has a very awkward 'a', so Dennis decided to use Catull for the 'G' to tie the brand to Google, then cast the others in a cleaner sans-serif (Myriad Pro, if I recall correctly).
Another ex-Googler, Douglas Edwards, confirms the story in his book "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59":
Dennis Hwang spent the day before the launch coming up with ideas for a logo and trying to make it work in conjunction with the clown-colored Google brand. (...) Even after four years at Google, I found it astounding that one twenty-something guy was sitting alone at his desk, sipping tea and developing the main branding element for a product to be used by millions of people - the night before it was scheduled to launch.
Nice timing.
ReplyDeleteI was trying to explain this to someone the other day that was wanting to spend many thousands on their branding for a small site.
That's a funny story. Thanks for sharing the history of Google. Kind of giving us an insight as to how it became this huge. :)
ReplyDeleteGreat post!
Great story, very useful for young designer
ReplyDeletegmail logo rocks
ReplyDeleteThx, nice post
ReplyDeleteI'm very sorry for google...
ReplyDeleteA very unprofessional process and result.
ReplyDeleteI hope young designers and other companies understand this.
Google can invest in quality design so why just take a jack it?
That is not the point, dude ...
Delete