A few days ago, I dug a new Google logo out of a Chrome Beta Android APK. The new logo did away with all the beveling and shadowing for a flat, clean look with more muted colors. It would be the first Google logo tweak since 2010. Shortly after the story was posted, The Verge updated their coverage of the news with the following:

Update: A person familiar with Google's branding tells The Verge that this is not a replacement for the company's traditional logo. Instead, the flatter design is used in instances where the beveled logo may not display well — such as on printed banners or other corporate use cases. The logo in question has been already pulled from where it first appeared in the latest Chrome for Android beta, signaling that the company quickly realized its mistake. Suffice it to say, the Google logo you know and love isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

However, since the article was posted, we've been seeing more and more evidence that doesn't seem to fit this explanation. While the logo is not currently in use in Chrome for Android Beta, it is still being distributed in the APK, even after an update. If it was a mistake, we would expect it to be removed from the app. It's also important to note that the Chrome APK contains no other Google logos; there are only flat versions.

Also, if the image is only used in instances where the beveled logo does not display well, why are the colors also different? An unbeveled logo would make sense for an alternate use, but not a logo with completely different colors.

The logo appearing by accident in one place would be one thing, but the redesigned logo is also hosted on Google's servers. The current logo for Google.com resides at https://www.google.com/images/srpr/logo4w.png, but if you change "logo4w" to "logo5w" or "logo6w," you get the redesigned logo. There is also an alternate location for the new logo here. In fact, there's a new Google interface experiment that uses this large logo on Google.com.

The only "instances where the beveled logo may not display well" that we can think of would be particularly small uses of the logo. But why then is there a giant, 500px-wide version of this on the main Google page?

Spanish-language site Googlelizados has spotted the flat logo in another instance: during a Google Search experiment. There are multiple versions of this image on gstatic.com (a Google image server) here, here, and here.

The most telling evidence is that the new logo design is a perfect match for Google's Web icons. Roger Oddone, a senior graphic designer at Google, recently posted "Google Visual Asset Guidelines," a full set of guidelines for iconography and logo design at Google. The new logo matches this design language in many ways that the old logo does not. The guidelines state that the iconography should be flat and only lightly shaded, just like the redesign. A Google wordmark is shown several times, but only ever as flat, single-color versions—the beveled logo is never shown or discussed. We are even given a set of color palettes, which just happen to be a perfect match for the new logo!

The explanation given to The Verge just doesn't line up with reality. The redesigned logo isn't just for print or small uses. It seems to be slowly spreading across Google's Web properties. It suspiciously has shown up in several completely unrelated locations all around the same time. It also matches the recently created design language for Google's iconography and would bring design unity to Google's icons and logos.