Earth wobbles on axis as Google rebrands Paradigms were shifted and the Earth possibly wobbled a little on its axis yesterday as Google announced a new logo to brand its continuing drive towards total world domination. According to a blog post, the revamp includes a fresh face and an "identity family", all suitable for deployment across the bewildering and exciting …
yawn.
Well, actually, with more use of small-screen devices, non-serifed less-rounded fonts are easier to read. A couple of years back the Beeb de-italicised their logo as upright lettering is crisper on the more common smaller displays people are using.
Edit: just noticed somebody else posted exactly the same point while I was typing.
...the Earth is always wobbling in its orbit, thanks to the often overlooked fact that the Moon doesn't actually orbit Earth, rather they orbit each other around their common barycenter - which just happens to be about 1/4 of Earth radius under the surface of the Earth, causing it to waltz around the Sun in a somewhat wobbly fashion (I swear the wobble is readily detectable, but for some weird reason only on Friday afternoons...)
Point well taken. I also had this pointed out to me in my junior high school astronomy class. Still, as the Earth/Moon system's barycenter is within the Earth, most regular folks are good with the idea of the Moon "orbiting" the Earth.
Now, if you want a really good example of a "wobbly" system, check out some of the time lapses of Pluto and Charon taken by New Horizons on approach prior to the flyby. The barycenter of the Pluto/Charon system is well outside Pluto, and Pluto can be seen visibly wobbling in space as Charon tugs at it as they orbit their common barycenter much in the manner of a binary star.
The elegant logo in Giovanni font looked legible enough on 1024*768 shadow mask screens in 1999-2000. Nobody asked for a paragraph of body text set that type and color to be read. If devices with an even lower resolution screen than that exist today, which I doubt, Google could serve a simplified logo exclusively to them, perhaps in formatted HTML, and no pictures at all. Problem solved.
The earth did kinda wobble, because I heard about the logo on the World Service yesterday. I didn't pay any attention to yet another "doodle" on the corner of the search results page.
It's obvious why this has happened now. As a subsidiary of Alphabet it was time for a new logo, brand, image, business cards and expensive lunch discussing the whale and joss-stick budget just so it's clear to people they're a new company and not just a paperwork/legal/tax re-jig of the same old monster
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