SketchUp gets a face-lift!

Okay… admittedly SketchUp itself looks in the latest maintenance release that came out today (Version 8, Maintenance Release 4) much like it did before the update. What has changed, though, is the logo/icon and therefore, the brand of the software. Here are the changes:

New Icon Old Icon
SketchUp
LayOut
Style Builder

You can now expect to see this logo popping up everywhere in SketchUp-land: The blog, the website etc. I wonder if users will go through the usual acceptance process: rejection (“I liked the old one better”) – objection (“This isn’t bad but could be better”) – denial (“I’ll just make my own logo”) – acceptance (“It’s not so bad after all”)…

While the new logos will undoubtedly be discussed over-and-over, I must say I like the new look. The logos now have a nicely polished appearance and are more symbolic than representative. I also appreciate the simplicity of using the same 3D model for all three logos: The new SketchUp logo is three-dimensional and has dynamically upward-pointing arrows (the “Up” in SketchUp is clearly there) while the style builder logo is just the same with sketchy lines. Finally, the LayOut logo is a two-dimensional version of the shape with dimension lines added. As a further identifier, one can even make out “LO” in the geometry.

On the nuts-and-bolts side of things it should be remarked that this was mainly a maintenance release, so the changes are mostly bugfixes. Here are the details:

  • Black backgrounds in text boxes in web dialogs on Macs should now be history. This was caused by a recent update to Safari on the Mac.
  • The user interface has been updated for the Mac retina display.
  • SketchUp has been rebranded and “Google” has been removed where applicable.

So what are you waiting for, hit the “Check for Update” button in SketchUp and get the latest version now!

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