Steve Francia

26 April 2018

Introduction

I am delighted to announce the launch of Go’s new look and logo.

Go has been on an amazing journey over the last 8+ years. Our project, community and users have evolved through this journey and we wanted the Go brand to reflect where we have been and convey where we are going.

Go’s new brand is about our identity, our values, and our users. Over the past several months we have worked with a brand agency to develop a brand guide for Go. Our agency, Within, coordinated with and built upon the great foundation that Renee French established. Rest easy, our beloved Gopher Mascot remains at the center of our brand.

New Logo

Our logo follows the brand’s core philosophy of simplicity over complexity. Using a modern, italicized sans-serif typeface combined with three simple motion lines forms a mark that resembles two wheels in rapid motion, communicating speed and efficiency. The circular shape of the letters hints at the eyes of the Go gopher, creating a familiar shape and allowing the mark and the mascot to pair well together.

Our new logo went through an extensive design process. Here are some of the revisions we went through…

New Brand Guide

The brand guide establishes the mission, values and voice for the Go project. In general terms, a brand guide is a reference tool for establishing a consistent brand identity. It is sometimes referred to as “brand guidelines” or a “brand book”. It is a single document that serves as a guide and reference to designers, writers, and developers to create consistent, on-brand content.

New presentation themes

In addition to our brand guide we have also developed a presentation theme. This presentation theme will enable us to have a consistent representation of Go in person at meetups and conferences as well as online. Go community members are welcome to use this theme for their own presentations.

The presentations are available as Google Slides presentations. We chose Google slides as it is easy to share and maintain updates. People are welcome to port them to keynote, powerpoint, etc.

Like this blog and all our gopher images, the slide themes are Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licensed. The photos in the slides are all from unsplash and are released under the unsplash license.

Instructions to use slides:

Open the Go Slide Masters presentation on Google slides.

File > “Make a Copy” (you may need to login first)

Create new slides using the layouts provided in the layouts menu.

Use the included example slides to help guide the styling and creation of your presentation.

Download

The brand guide, logo and themes are copyrighted by the Go authors.

The brand guide contains the guidelines for acceptable logo use.

What’s happening next

The website will be getting a refresh based on the new design. Since we are making significant changes, we are also taking this opportunity to update our website infrastructure to better serve our global community with internationalization and multilingual support. The migration will happen in stages over the next few months starting with this blog.