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Paypal's logo designed to look like a recommendation?

Dec 15, 2010

I noticed something today, while grabbing a Humble Bundle 2, that really caught me by surprise. Check out this grab from their checkout process:

Now, its a lot more evident when you're on the actual page, but what I noticed was that Paypal's slogan the safer, easier way to pay looks more like its part of the webpage than the actual logo. Simply by picking a common hyperlink color (blue) and removing the anti-aliasing they make it look like its the website itself which is recommending paypal as the better choice.

I'm pretty sure that it only really sticks out when you are presented with the choice, which isn't too common. Google also keeps the text plain, but something about the wording (likely the inclusion of the word Google) makes it more clear, to me anyways, that this text belongs with the image.

Now, I don't know anything about design, much less typography, but you'd have a hard time convincing me this isn't intentional.