Whenever you open a new tab in Chrome, the favicon of the website appears in the tab. This favicon is a super-tiny icon for the website. A mere 15×15 pixels in size.
The favicon for Google’s online spreadsheet program looks like a cross! Now, Google’s intent is certainly to show two lines intersecting to represent the grid in spreadsheets.
Can you imagine the variations of this favicon that Google might have done? Perhaps the first one had the vertical line going straight down the middle. Someone probably said, “too much like a cross.” So they lowered down the horizontal bar a bit. Then someone at Google got nervous and said, “now that looks like an upside-down cross! We can’t upset a large percentage of the world’s population!” So then they slide the vertical bar over a little bit. “There, that’s better!”
But once you see the cross in Google Sheets’ favicon, it TOTALLY looks like a cross.
Plus, this uses the color green in the background. The church’s traditional liturgical color for the “Ordinary Time” after Pentecost is green. This season takes up most of the church year. Maybe someone at Google thought they were being tricky by making the background the color, and the lines to be white. But a white cross to me says Christianity all the more.
I first noticed this when I pulled open my spreadsheet that contains a list of baseball cards with Bible verse inscriptions. That’s rather fitting that the very spreadsheet that I noticed this cross resemblance was on a spreadsheet filled with Bible verses.
Ok, so if we carry this Christian theme over to Google’s other favicons in Google Drive, how do they look?
The Google Drive favicon is a triangle. Trinity!
The Google Docs favicon is document—but could it also be a page from the Bible?!
Just having some fun reading interpretations into Google’s favicons. 🙂