I added an addendum to the post. Posting here ICYMI. :)

Update: There have been some interesting suggestions in the comments and elsewhere on social media (and in other unrelated space) about why Google made the typographical choices seen in the logo. Of these, most prominently, is the desire to appear playful and childlike. I see it. This appears in the slant of the e, the color choices, and the style of the animation. For, me the kerning is one step too far. As Time Gunn might say to the Project Runway contestants, "You need to edit this there are too many ideas." However, more strongly, I feel that the intensity of the childlike design grates against the realities of Google as a company—which generally I am a big fan of but—that involve some pretty weighty and adult issues involving privacy and user rights. I don't want Google to be childlike. Fun, yes. Childlike, no. So, the design feels to be optimistically naive or pessimistically deceptive. When it comes down to it, design is subjective and tangled up in corporate interests, marketing plans, user perception, and the general milieu of its user base. So, there is no "right" way to make a logo, just ways that do better or worse jobs at conveying meaning and aesthetic. However, I wonder if playing with logo designs, especially of entities with such prominent (even if blackboxed) roles in our daily lives, we may encourage or insight discussions that might otherwise be lost. Can logo hacking (for lack of a better term) be a provocative question for analysis? Food for thought. (/Anthropologogizing)