Hat tip D_MAGIK for the basic shape in this drawing. This was a failed experiment to see if treating the shape as a David Smith-like sculpture on a hillside would blunt its instant recognizability. Perhaps someone in the world has never seen Matt Groening's apelike character but then that person would have no referent of a "David Smith-like sculpture" either, and would simply see a curving line and a circle against a blue sky, casting an unexplained shadow.
Google recently switched their logo from a serif font to a creepily infantile sans-serif. They have kept their vaunted "minimal" search page design so the kindergarten logo really stands out now. It's as if the more monopolistic and world-straddling the company becomes, the more innocent-looking they want their "facing forward" page to be. At one point, as they gobbled up smaller companies, these subsidiary functions added more typography to the top of the search page. Then, a year or two ago, they scaled this verbiage back, as seen in the screen shot above.
