The Peoria Dispatch

I have always enjoyed the Google holiday/event logos.  Not only are they often very creative and artistic, but they highlight a wide variety of notable dates beyond usual holidays:  birthday/anniversary days of significant people, and landmark events of all types ranging from the well known to very geeky.  Some of my favorites appeared just last year:

Earth Day:

Large Hadron Collider activation (and the potential end of Earth):

Election Day:

Their artistic ability (or standards, for guest artists) has greatly improved over the years.  Here is their 2008 Halloween logo:

Compare that to their less impressive, cut-and-paste clip art effort from 1999:

They’ve definitely raised the bar, and I’ve come to expect high quality, clever logos from Google.  Which brings us to today, Valentine’s Day 2009:

Boy, they really spared no expense on this one!  Font-color = Red.  Wow.  And the kisses and hugs…  well my first reaction when I saw the logo was that Google.com had been hacked.  The X and O look like something found at a crime scene in “CSI”.  Not well done, especially for Valentine’s day.

Oh well, maybe next year.  I still like the holiday logo concept and Google’s minimalist style (as opposed to the fancy animations over at yahoo.com), but they showed their slack side today.