Has Anyone Else Noticed The New Look Of The Google Plus One Button?

I’m sure these weren’t there this afternoon.

Google has sprung yet another design modification on us, this time on its now popular plus one button. The bright multi-coloured button is gone, and has been replaced with two grey buttons that turn bright red when they are clicked.

Yeah, I said “buttons” because it appears that there are indeed two of them – one type for Google+, the other for the rest of the web. The new look started rolling out publicly earlier today.

Here is the old button -

Here is the new button for Google+

Here is the new button for the web

Why? Beats me. The official two line reason says that they want the button to look more like the Google+ logo. Very convincing…

Google has been rolling out a number of weird design tweaks across its services lately. There is the Google Plus Share widget that has become a permanent fixture in search and email. For observant users of Chrome, you might have noticed that there is no longer a “+” sign on the new tab button. A really quirky one is the decision to make the top left Google logo in search and Google+ unclickable. One of their former devs thinks all of this is silly, but I think we should cut Google some slack, they just turned thirteen last year…afterall, an obsession with looks is one of the hallmarks of the teenage years, no?

What do you think of Google’s current makeover obsession?