matt johnson
logomark
Google Pay
scroll to see more
Opportunity
As Google prepared to expand both Google Pay and Google Wallet globally, each product needed a strong, distinct logomark to stand on its own across devices, product surfaces, and marketing.
DELIVERABLE
A design and brand specification for the Google Pay app launcher and de facto product logomark.
CONTRIBUTION
• Iterated and drove final mark selection
• Navigated various Google brand, marketing, and trademark review processes
• Produced specifications and assets formally published for use across various Google product & marketing teams
DetAils
Company
:
Product
:
Google Pay
Role
:
Lead Designer
Timeframe
:
2021 Q3
GPay Brand Baggage
For over a decade, the GPay Acceptance Mark (A) pulled double duty: signaling 'pay with Google here' at checkout while also representing the product itself. In 2018, Tez – a standalone payments app we built for India – graduated to a formal Google product and adopted the same mark, since Google's contactless payment wasn't available there.
By 2020, Google was ready to expand both offerings across two dozen markets, and the brand story needed cleaning up. Each market required a distinct mark for the expanded Google Wallet (B) and the newly introduced Google Pay app (C). Both needed distance from the Acceptance Mark to stand alone, while still leveraging it as a universal checkout identifier.
Setting up for Success
Apart from distinguishing the new product experiences, Google's payment history in different markets framed four specific objectives of designing Google Pay's new brandmark:
Mark a New Era
20+ markets around the world had an existing Google Pay Android APK in market that would need to be deprecated while existing users migrated to the new APK.
Reconcile Identity
The Google Pay app in India and Singapore currently used a modified version of the Acceptance Mark as the app's launcher identity.
Belongs in the Big Leagues
The Google Pay app was graduating to a 'flagship' offering and needed to fit amongst Google's big, legacy, first-party offerings.
Avoids the Acceptance Mark
Past experience indicated that the Acceptance Mark (and variants of it) simply didn't perform well at app launcher scale.
Gathering Requirements
Before design kicked off, I met with stakeholders across Google's consumer organizations to gather requirements. Some constraints came down from Google's overarching brand standards while others surfaced from teams with experience using the Acceptance Mark on product and marketing touchpoints.
Google Guidelines
Use Google brand colors
Use the grid and keylines
Avoid icons with G or acronymic icons
Avoid ribbon icons
Avoid colors that clash when touching
Contextual Goals / Feedback
Implies movement and potential energy
Maximizes footprint within the grid
All 4 colors read at launcher and smaller scales
Spotlights the primary product color (Google Blue)
Avoids using spatial or lighting cues
Moving Past the Legacy
Given the Acceptance Mark's strong equity, the first instinct was to explore augmenting or adorning it before drawing anything from scratch. The resulting explorations could have worked in single-product markets, but nothing in that direction could adequately differentiate the two products or solve the existing legibility issues at small scale.
Aiming for Abstract
With confidence established in the need for a new direction, exploration moved across four communicative themes:
Wallet
Communicated payment use-case effectively but left little room for the broader Google Wallet experience.
Exchange
Anchored on the value exchange between merchant and consumer as the defining proposition of Google Pay.
Intersection
Visualized the core intersections of the product: merchants, payment methods, in-store and online.
Spots / Connection
Leaned into in-product brand elements like the Google Pay Spot Code or merchant iconography.
The final mark emerged from explorations in the Intersection and Exchange themes, abstractly reinforcing the reciprocal relationship between consumers and merchants/retailers and the literal exchange of value between them.
Tactically, this mark more than others, maximized its footprint in a plated variant (common in app launchers, in-store, ads) and held up cleanly in monochrome (common in co-brand lockups and for mobile OS notifications).
Justifying the Gradient
The primary Google brand colors share similar saturation and brightness – a combination that produces optical vibration and low contrast when placed side by side. With an overlapping mark like this, that tension was unavoidable, and slightly darker shades were needed to ensure clean edge contrast. Since Google's brand guidelines don't bend easily, making the case for a color exception was its own process but a necessary one to present the mark at its best.
Lockup Variants
A preliminary dimension of validation was rendering the mark in Google's standardized product lockups – primary horizontal and two vertical orientations – across both light and dark contexts.
in Product Contexts…
Contextual mockups were critical for earning buy-in across Google's product and marketing teams. Showing stakeholders exactly how and where consumers would encounter the mark in the wild started with the most frequent use-case: the app launcher.
in Marketing Contexts…
Next, revealing how lockups would work in conjunction with messaging and imagery.
in Google's Portfolio…
Then, visualizing the mark alongside the rest of Google's broad portfolio of products oft-criticized for being too elementary and hard to differentiate at a glance.
as a sibling of Google Wallet…
Then, co-existing along with the leading proposal for the new Google Wallet logomark.
alongside the Acceptance Mark…
Lastly, identifying critical journeys of both Google Wallet and Google Pay experiences where the Acceptance Mark deserved to be the hero over the product brandmark.
Production & Execution
After shepherding the mark through approval all the way up to Google CMO Lorraine Twohill, the final step was cutting production assets for every context Google teams would need to deploy it:
Client Assets
Apple App Store & Google Play Store
iOS & Android App Launchers
Notification Assets
App Splash and Embedded Assets
Animated Assets + Source
Acceptance Mark > App Reveal
Horizontal Lockup Reveals & Endtags
Vertical Lockup Reveals & Endtags
Endorsed Digital RGB Assets
Logomark Variants (Color & Mono)
Protected Variants (Clearspace & Plated)
Horizontal Lockups (Color & Mono)
Vertical Lockups (Color & Mono)
Endorsed Print CMYK Assets
Logomark Variants (Gradient, Flattened, Greyscale)
Protected Variants (Clearspace & Plated)
Horizontal Lockups (Gradient, Flattened, Greyscale)
Vertical Lockups (Gradient, Flattened, Greyscale)
REFLECTIONS
Having led design for Tez in India and then the Google Pay app globally, it was a welcome change of pace to get back into hyper-detailed visual craft. I wouldn't wish a Google-sized gauntlet of brand and marketing councils on anyone, but there's something satisfying about distilling everything a team built into a 24×24 pixel mark.
WINS
＋ Met Google-wide standards and internal requirements with few compromises
＋ Seniority and experience kept turnaround tight and approvals efficient
FAILS
– Value communication stays abstract for a product logomark (though not unlike much of Google's portfolio)
– The gradient fix for contrast introduces (re)production complexity downstream
– The monochrome variant loses the visual overlap that makes the full-color mark work
DIFFICULTY
Tightly constrained on both communication and deliverable fronts
High-visibility project with senior, opinionated stakeholders
Arduous review, compliance, and approval process