Google Hacks, 2nd Edition

Borrow a Corporate or Product Logo

Add a bit of spice to your presentation or school report by using a corporate, project, product, or service logo.

You have a presentation or proposal to make and want to add a hint of your target audience’s branding. Or perhaps you want to spice up a school report on a company, product, or service. You visit their web site and find that every instance of their logo would need some heavy editing to get rid of background clutter, toolbar bits, and so forth.

There are a few ways that Google can help you.

Tip

This hack began as a discussion at http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/227 and owes a debt to the comments on that page.

Google Images

Point your browser at Google Images (http://images.google.com) and search for the company, project, product, or service name—grouped together in double quotes (“) if you think this needs to be explicit—and a modifier signifying what sort of image you’re after: logo, emblem, mascot, crest, "coat of arms“, etc. On the whole, logo seems to work best. Here are some examples:

"microsoft research" logo
"harvard university" crest
"apache software foundation" logo

Google Images will usually return a virtual gallery of logos. And, chances are, one of them is an unadulterated version on a plain white or black background. Figure 3-2 shows what turns up if you search for "microsoft research" logo.

Figure 3-2. Microsoft Research logos turned ...