Google Chrome

Productivity, meet Individuality

In 2008, Chrome made the web work better, simplifying an experience that had become cluttered, clunky, and prone to crashing. But a lot’s changed since then. Social apps have become our new “browsing” platforms; and Chrome has become a place for more targeted discovery and real-world action-taking, a place where you do you. So we updated Chrome’s brand identity to depict a more personal kind of productivity—real people finding meaning in their daily activities, building confidence through accomplishment.

Our Role:

Research

Strategy

Visual Identity

Art Direction

Brand Voice

Motion

Collaborators:

Interbrand, Arts & Letters

Picturing personality

We designed a comprehensive system with abstracted Chrome UI and Material 3 color cues to tell stories of personal productivity, individuals using Chrome to boldly do the things they care about. Whether it’s repairing a well-worn pair of hiking boots or finding tickets to a sold-out concert in Budapest, Chrome helps you do more you.

We designed Chrome's system to be, quite literally, centered around you, the individual. The goal is to help Chrome tell more vivid, relatable stories about its users, some of the billions of people for whom Chrome is a primary browser.

Constructing our graphic language

Chrome used to have a simpler, type-driven visual identity. Once we decided to depict real-life Chrome usage, we had to start by creating a language of elementary shapes for holding a framing content. Our language takes inspiration from digital UI and the circular shape of the Chrome logo, which naturally morphs into lozenge shapes and rounded rectangles.

A system informed by product

Building on our graphic language, in collaboration with Chrome’s UX team, we elaborated four modes that reflect how people use their Chrome. Internal team members and agency partners can use these modes to tell stories about people finding things on the web, curating their interests, connecting the dots on their web journeys, and finally taking action.

Our "Find" mode can visualize the beginning of a journey with Chrome, from Search to Bookmarks.

Our "Connect" mode is designed to visualize people's complex (or simple) web journeys, the paths they go on to book a reservation or finish a Slides presentation.

Our "Curate" mode allows the Chrome team to visualize how people, F1 drivers included, collect and organize their interests online.

Our "Act" mode helps the team visualize how people take action on Chrome: purchasing things, clicking into new tabs, confirming reservations.

Clear UI is kind

To streamline storytelling around key features, we reduced the complexity of Chrome’s product UI. Depending on the needs of a particular channel, UI can range from elements lifted directly from the product experience all the way to abstracted UI that only communicates the most pertinent information about a specific feature.

Depicting tabs and tab groups allows the team to speak more clearly about these key features. It also adds context to a person's web journey.

A marketing-friendly storytelling system

The magic happens when we combine our abstracted UI elements and UX modes to depict stories of personal productivity, individuals pursuing their interests with the help of Chrome. This combination allows Chrome to tell vivid, detailed stories of real and fictional users all over the world, while also communicating product messages.

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Imaginative spot Illustrations are helpful for explaining key product benefits and simplifying complex ideas into more digestible visuals.

Capturing Googliness

To align the new system with Google’s personality, we explored ways to dial up playfulness in execution. File names, Dino references, UI placement all became key in presenting a brand that wasn’t just product-centric and user-focused, but friendly and fun as well.

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Our brand identity was rapidly stress-tested and implemented on a refreshed Chrome product website, courtesy of Huge.