Google Releases Branding Guidelines For Glass™

Do you cringe when you hear people talk about Google Glasses? So does Google, it seems. The company today released a set of branding guidelines for its developers to clarify how they can use the Glass™ icon and brand name in their products. Update: looks like the guidelines were actually on the Glass Developer site before, but mostly went unnoticed. Google recently updated the navigation of the site (that’s how I found out about them) and made the link to the branding guidelines more obvious, likely to emphasize most of the rules we describe below. In this document, Google stresses that “Glass” can never be part of the name of a company that produces software for Glass, for example. You can call a product “Cat Facts for Glass” but never “Glass Cat Facts.” It’s okay to use “Glass” as a descriptor (Glass optics), though. Google also stresses that whenever you use the “for Glass” construction in your logo, “for Glass” must be a smaller size than the rest. Another rule states that Glass is always supposed to be capitalized and “is never plural or possessive.” This means, you aren’t supposed to say “”Wear Google Glasses” or “Swipe forward on Glass’s timeline.” I can see why the plural doesn’t make sense, given that the product name is Glass, but the only reason not to use the possessive, it seems, is that any word that ends with an ‘s’ always looks a bit off once it becomes a possessive. One interesting guideline Google notes is that whenever users share content through Glass, developers are supposed to use the #throughglass hashtag “to categorize it for easy discoverability and aggregation” or “Sent through Glass” in emails. Most of this is pretty straightforward (except for the odd rule around the possessive). It does show, however, that as more Glass software slowly becomes available now that the Glass Development Kit is in “Sneak Peak,” Google is starting to lay down a few more rules for developers.