Rubenerd

One of the current memes surrounding Google Drive seems to be how their logo was copied from Vplayer. As a logo nerd, I felt it my duty to clear the air!

TechInAsia’s post

From TechInAsia, where the above mockup is from:

The Drive icon is essentially the Vplayer one with a bit of dimensional shading added, spun 90-degrees anti-clockwise, and then looked at from the other side. [..]

What do you think of the Drive logo? Perhaps Google got its inspiration elsewhere – maybe from the funky new tech blog The Verge. Let us know in the comments.

I would let you know in the comments section of your site, but it needs JavaScript. Oh well!

You install it on your Möb-ilephone

While copying isn't unexpected behaviour from Google necessarily, I find TechInAsia's claim that their new logo was a copy of Vplayer to be a bit of a stretch. As far as I can tell, both services are employing Möbius Strip-like designs in their logos.

In fact, if we really wanted to discuss which companies are copying off whom, it took me a minute of image searching to come up with these:

The latter should be of most concern to Android and Google users, for it's an application for iPhones! It's name also gives away the design device in question.

Recycled

Still, perhaps the best known example of a Möbius Strip in use is the recycling icon. Perhaps it's making a comment that all these icons for all these services are merely reusing this same idea ;).

Here's my terrible mockup of the recycling icon, in the Google Drive colours.

Conclusion

So I suppose the case could be made that the Google Drive logo bears a resemblence to Vplayer, but to be fair to Google, they're icon is a derivative of many, many others which were all based on a single wondrous twist of a belt.

There are many legitimate technical and privacy concerns surrounding Google Drive. This isn't one of them.