Why is it okay for the Google logo to be “geometrically wrong”?

Many graphic design professionals and enthusiasts analyze the new logos of famous companies to study how they work and why they were made in a particular way. And of course, when a big company such as Google introduces a change in their logotype, the Internet studies it to the millimeter. This is what happened to the Google logo!

People have noticed that Google’s newest “G” monogram is “geometrically wrong”. If you trace a circumference around it on Photoshop or Illustrator, you will see that even though the inner circle is perfectly symmetrical, the outer circle of the shape isn’t. The G doesn’t really fit inside a circle.

But that isn’t the only “flaw”. The color intersections also are placed in a way that doesn’t meet in the center, but is there actually a reason behind all of this?

This isn’t an accident, as Will Paterson explains on his Youtube channel. This design isn’t a mistake, and it’s made on purpose, completely intended to look that way. In the past, we saw that the Nintendo Switch also had symmetry issues, but they actually made the logotype look a lot better than if it was perfectly symmetrical.

So, despite many people saying that the design is a mistake because it isn’t correctly aligned, but it’s actually a form of visual compensation. The logotype works perfectly in the visual aspect, that isn’t arguable. Optical stabilizing is a very important aspect behind a typography: aesthetics are sometimes more important than math, in these aspects, and that is why the designers had to make some tweaks to the typography to make it look optically balanced.

You can watch the video to listen to Will Paterson’s thorough explanation on this concept and some Illustrator experiments performed by him to recreate the logo, and take a look at his channel for more graphic design content here!