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Google's new logos are bad
- frogpelt 6y agoHonestly, it looks like Google is marketing to preschool kids.
- awillen 6y agoThis really just feels like the author isn't a fan of change. Reminds me of how everyone has complained for about two weeks after each change of Apple's icon style, then realized the new ones are fine, and it just doesn't matter that much. In two weeks, nobody will notice these new icons either.
- dragonsngoblins 6y agoI disagree that the author just isn't a fan of change. The old ones are definitely more readable/distinct and in my opinion there is value in that. Of course everyone will stop talking about it in 2 weeks, there isn't all that much to talk about. It isn't a huge deal that the icons are slightly worse for these things, it will cause no major problems or anything like that. But it not being a big deal doesn't make the author wrong about these being very similar to each other and that making them less readable at a glance.
- nbzso 6y ago“Just feels” is not a design measurement. Designing logos is a professional skill build with years of learning visual rules and practicing implementation. This logos are clearly designed in-house by someone without the knowledge of use of white space and contrast. Color must compliment a shape in logo design, here color fights with the shapes and is reason for eyestrain. Google is engineer centric company, in my view they never looked at design seriously, and never will. They bring iterative change to branding just for the sake of “change”. And people react, not without reason in this case.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoRumor has it the design team was bypassed to make these icons as a VP special.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYou put this in a much better description than I could come up with but it captures all my sentiments about why I dislike this. The colors are too overwhelming and "thicc" for my tastes.
- vonwoodson 6y agoFlat UI’s are boring. Check this out: https://youtu.be/TIUMgiQ7rQs https://youtu.be/TIUMgiQ7rQs Dynamically lit, 3D interferences for the win!
- Akronymus 6y agoBoring is good though.
- rland 6y agoGod that is incredible. A youtube comment mentioned it, but I could see this happening under Jobs... it would be a huge stride forward.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y agoThat's ridiculously cool.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoHow could someone shoot that awkward 4 minute video and still think the project was with working on?
- totalZero 6y agoNah, I agree with the author. When I see the Gmail logo in the Android header bar, it doesn't evoke mail like the little envelope did. It just looks like a wide, foppish, transparent "M". It's like a single entendre. Where previously it represented "mail" (semantically) and "envelope" (visually), now it simply looks like a nondescript bat-signal.
- Groxx 6y agoAnd is it "M" for "Meet" or "M" for "Messages" or "M" for "Gmail"? One of those three is not like the others. I bet you can guess where my mind doesn't go first.
- mkskm 6y agoThe recently updated Google Maps icon on iOS from earlier this year looks so out of place. It makes me want to delete the app.
- dvtrn 6y agoIt took me a weird amount of time to find Apps when I needed once because of the icon change. I knew exactly what folder it should have been in, even the row column placement of it. ....and yet I kept closing and swiping to other screens, swiping back before I realized “oh wait it’s right there”
- cobookman 6y agoMy phone recently bricked itself, requiring me to factory reset my iOS. Because of the redesign, i decided to try out Apple Maps before attempting to re-install Google Maps. Have yet to re-install google maps since, with Apple Maps actually much improved.
- mkskm 6y agoHad a similar experience, but ended up reinstalling to get offline maps.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoIf you don't mind larger feature sizes, give waze a try. It pulls from the same backend and algos.
- jeffbee 6y agoThis guy is right that this redesign sabotages Gmail's bulletproof brand, but he doesn't mention the real motivation. This is Google we're talking about. They hired a new VP for these apps and since VPs are essentially useless people, he ordered up a redesign to show impact. He's even quoted in the article with some perfect nonsense that couldn't have been written anywhere but at a megacorp.
- hashtagmarkup 6y agoDoes the new VP's name start with M? I am extremely confused by the new notification icons.
- cyberbanjo 6y ago“This is the moment in which we break free from defining the structure and the role of our offerings in terms that were invented by somebody else in a very different era,” Google VP Javier Soltero told Fast Company. Is what GP refers too
- teruakohatu 6y agoSounds like something generated by a primitive twitter bot. On the other hand is does describe what Google does which is constantly change/close its offerings in a way nobody wanted or asked for.
- api 6y agoI can’t write shit like that. I guess that’s why I don’t make the big bucks.
- arthurcolle 6y agoas a color blind person (red-green and blue-yellow) these are very loud and a bit ugly to look at. PRE-EDIT: yes, I can see colors. they just clash when certain shades are exactly next to each other
- willio58 6y agoAs a non color blind person I agree on those two points. It always astonishes me how lack-luster google’s design language is.
- Alex3917 6y agoGoogle's design language is amazing, but their color recommendations are terrible. The problem is that they require lots of contrast to help people with visual impairments, at the expense of making content ugly and unreadable for everyone else. It's unclear why we can't just have a media query to increase contrast to AA or AAA for those who need it, while leaving apps nice looking for those who don't benefit from the extra contrast.
- Fej 6y agoThere will be a media query, prefers-contrast, but it's a question mark as to when browsers will implement it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- candiddevmike 6y agoReally agree with this. The new icons are awful and look too similar, both from a design and color scheme. Makes it very hard to quickly discern the apps without focusing on each icon individually.
- cowpig 6y agoMy interpretation is that google is afraid of products being separated into separate companies as a result of antitrust litigation and so is trying to use their branding to support their case that these totally separate services are inseparable.
- totalZero 6y agoOne of the cool things about Google has always been that it is an ecosystem of disparate tools that work together. Now, I suppose they have the existential incentive to meld those tools into a cloud amoeba, for precisely the purpose that you mention. I hope they get broken up, because maybe the new Gmail will go back to the older, better logo.
- sidthekid 6y agoCloud amoeba wins the phrase of the week.
- creddit 6y agoI can’t imagine how quickly they would be laughed out of a court with the argument of “you can’t split up our products, you see, the icons are all thematically the same!”
- tofuahdude 6y agoI cannot wait for this moment
- malwrar 6y agoAccording to this guy's various interviews over the last few months he's trying to integrate a lot of G-Suite services together into a single offering, so it won't just be the icons that are the same. Who knows, by the time the antitrust case comes close to any sort of conclusion they might actually have a single product that can't be easily split anymore. He's even trying to add in "anticipatory experiences" (his words)[1] that make the product feel like it just gets the work you're trying to do. This obviously plays directly to Google's strengths as an engineering and ML powerhouse, and who knows maybe that'll be an argument they can make too. 1: https://www.protocol.com/javier-soltero-google-microsoft-interview https://www.protocol.com/javier-soltero-google-microsoft-int...
- axaxs 6y agoThese icons are the worst. I think they're tacky colored and hideous, but in fairness, I'm not a graphic designer. So, I'll state the obvious...these icons no longer represent at a glance what the application is or does. The old ones conveyed function very well, except perhaps Drive.
- A-Train 6y agoExactly my thoughts. Calendar app should be a calendar. It is really hard to notice the new icons from all the others.
- TillE 6y agoThis is nearly as bad as grey/monochrome icons, which is the way Google chose to ruin the GMail interface years back. In both cases you're completely discarding one great way to let users quickly and easily distinguish between different icons: color. Apple did the same thing with the iTunes interface (colors -> grey) even longer ago, and I just don't get it. Different colors are objectively good for the UX. It's information that gets instantly processed by your brain.
- duffmancd 6y agoAnd Microsoft with recent additions to Office. The larger icons in the ribbon at least have splashes of colour, but the quick access toolbar is entirely monochrome.
- trilinearnz 6y agoThey tried the monochrome look with the Visual Studio toolbar a few iterations back. It did not end well! The simultaneous introduction of uppercase menu bar text probably didn't help, either :)
- pgcj_poster 6y agoMonochrome icons cause the interface to recede into the background, giving more focus to the content. It's the same logic behind hiding UI elements when not in use. This is a good choice in situations where the user is mainly viewing content rather than interacting with the application—for instance, PDF readers and video players. Google probably found that most users use Gmail mainly for reading, rather than processing, emails—and decided that it should more like a viewer and less like an application.
- thesuperbigfrog 6y ago>> Google probably found that most users use Gmail mainly for reading, rather than processing, emails—and decided that it should more like a viewer and less like an application. Do they really think that people do not write emails any more?
- vsskanth 6y agoWhat is typically the point of a logo redesign ? When is it appropriate to redesign a logo ?
- amelius 6y agoIf you want to confuse your users.
- toast0 6y agoTo spend a bunch of money. When someone you know (especially someone you're related to) works for the ad agency.
- Larrikin 6y agoIt lately never seems appropriate for software lately when its mostly just constant bi-weekly incremental upgrades. When there is a massive re-imagining of the product is the time to create a new icon or logo. In software its become change for the sake of change and is almost never better, just different. But in the case of Domino's pizza making their pizza go from disgusting to a completely changed product that was less disgusting a total overhaul of the logo felt appropriate.
- nmfisher 6y agoIf anything, it's a good way to get PR. "Journalists" entertain the most banal stories as long as they're attached to name brands.
- pembrook 6y agoThat's because audiences will entertain the most banal stories as long as they're attached to name brands. Humans are creatures of habit who don't deal well with complexity and like what they are already familiar with. Hence, human cultural discourse is filled with a narrow selection of the same idols and demons. Trump good, Trump bad. Internet company good, internet company bad.
- nmfisher 6y ago
- ortusdux 6y agoGoogle Keep fans are already freaking out: https://i.redd.it/fyildc8gfov51.jpg https://i.redd.it/fyildc8gfov51.jpg
- perryizgr8 6y agoNow I have to migrate all my notes off to another service :(
- talmr 6y agoNotion is pretty good.
- 8note 6y agoI'll probably just stop having phone notes. Just write stuff down instead
- sharatvir 6y agoI like writing stuff down too but you miss out on search.
- screye 6y ago> Now I have to migrate all my notes off to another service :( > Now I have to migrate all my notes off to another service :( I'm glad I started migrating to one note. Although it does feel like there is space for an app between one note and keep.
- 013a 6y agoNotion is excellent, and probably not going anywhere.
- bjohnson225 6y agoNotion and Google Keep seem at opposite ends of the note taking spectrum though. Notion is incredibly powerful, but that strength was its weakness when I evaluated for personal use.
- jahlove 6y agoIn the desktop browser version of Gmail there is an advanced setting to show an "Unread message icon" in the bottom right of the Gmail favicon. Somehow with this rollout it's gotten a lot harder to see what the number is.
- ggm 6y agoDid they A/B test this?
- xingyzt 6y agoPlanning to write a script/extension that restores the favicons to the old style, if one doesn't exist already. Update: Published as a Greasyfork script. Only working for Drive & Meet right now. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/414827-retroogle https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/414827-retroogle
- salamimonger 6y agoThe new icons look like a new unpaid intern sat down for 5 minutes and started working after noting down what colors the Google logo contain.
- eyelidlessness 6y agoI’m not gonna read the article, I noticed the gmail icon change and I looked at the rest of the icons. The gmail one is excellent. I know what the heck my email notifications are for the first time in forever. The rest of them are “I used a design language” level of trash. Edit: I think I got preemptively downvoted by the HN comment system before I even saw my words on screen but I don’t care. I stand by this opinion.
- trilinearnz 6y agoI have to agree. I don't mind the triangular Drive icon as it's distinctive, but the others are far too similar to one another and the identical color scheme simply exacerbates this fact.
- calibas 6y agoTo me, the Gmail icon no longer looks like an envelope, but like it's got big teeth sticking down. It's kind of threatening...
- ineedasername 6y agoSo now it's not just apps and services, they're killing off brand recognition. I don't understand it. Well, on products at least, I have a theory: there used to be "Google Labs", an interesting selection of experimental projects that you knew were experimental and perhaps not permanent. Then they killed off Labs, and it's like everything that would previously been housed there is now released as if it's a fully fledge and supported service, only Google knows it's really just a "Lab" experiment. As a result, when those things get killed, it's much more against expectations, so it hits harder. Though perhaps not as much anymore now that we all expect it. This leads to an adoption problem: previously, a Lab that got enough attention might see a true release or be merged as a feature into an existing service. You could use it, not rely on it, and root for it to succeed. Now it's all reversed. You don't want to try a new thing out, you can't ever rely on it, you have no way to distinguish a fully backed initiative from a spaghetti-hits-wall approach. Basically, Google should resurrect Labs so people know where they stand on using these things.
- bluedays 6y agoDoesn't explain the death of Google Reader.
- ineedasername 6y agoI'm not proposing a unified theory of Google's choices. Google reader is more easily explained by other factors, specifically that it didn't fit nicely into the G+ push by Google and was not otherwise monetized by ads in any significant way at that point. Somewhat tragically, had they built a content-oriented social network around Reader instead of an ill-conceived integration to G+, it would have been more readily monetized and improved Google's chances of success in Social.
- fossuser 6y agoI’m short on google long term - they’re feeling more and more like yahoo to me. Lots of random projects, often killed, little direction - no overall vision. They better hope the ad revenue keeps printing money. It’s possible they could fix this (Microsoft did), but the direction doesn’t look great.
- 6stringmerc 6y ago"You'll get over it" - Jeff (1) (1) I'm not Jeff
- s3r3nity 6y ago>First I should say that I understand Google’s intent here, to unify the visual language of the various apps in its suite. Not sure I agree with that this is a useful endeavor. This just reeks of consistency for consistency sake. The polar opposite approach to this philosophy is Amazon, where utility and function for what's best for the user is always prioritized. When I look at the Amazon app icons, Kindle looks drastically different from Amazon core vs. Amazon music (Alexa, etc. etc.) But they work well at what they do, and so who cares how the icons look, nor whether or not people know that Kindle is an Amazon brand. This is just more evidence that Google Product Teams are shit, and are therefore trying to prioritize other ways to make an impact that is more visual. Sidebar: the article didn't even talk about the travesty that is the Google TV icon...essentially the docs icon, but sideways...
- sgc 6y agoAs long as we are excluding Amazon, the website, which is designed to make it as difficult as possible to do an in-depth search or meaningfully filter out items you don't want but they want to sell. It just feels like a spiderweb of dark patterns at this point.
- Epskampie 6y agoHaha yeah it’s hilarious. Amazon is trying to make headway in the netherlands, but their website gives such an insanely untrustworthy vibe with all the trash results and unclear vendors that I’m gladly paying a premium to stay with the known webshops.
- polytely 6y agoYeah, it's wild how much better bol.com or coolblue looks when you compare it to amazon.nl. I'm glad our local companies are good enough to stand a chance against Amazon.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThey could have just changed the color scheme up a bit though. These icons barely look like what they're meant to represent. They're just too simple and too colorful and at a glance look like each to the point that you have to stop and think about it. Terrible, terrible aesthetics and functionality.
- GhostVII 6y agoI really like the comment on the article that suggested making each icon focus on a single color. The icons look so much better, you can actually tell them apart without taking a few seconds to figure out which blob of color you are looking at. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xX8pKlUiSkG10-zIGZeKda5A9qfoZ08p/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xX8pKlUiSkG10-zIGZeKda5A9qf...
- notRobot 6y agoAgreed! IMO, Google Docs should remain blue though. Yellow is for slides, and has been for many, many years.
- diogenescynic 6y agoI really hate using G Suite at work. It’s my number one complaint about our tools. It’s truly an inferior product. I don’t know why we use it unless it was cheap. The nested emails in “conversation mode” are awful and keeping every email as a separate thread is also awful. Just really bad and hostile to the end user.
- starky 6y agoUgh, Gmail is actually terrible for corporate emails due to the long threads and numerous attachments I end up with. I'm so happy that I can use GSSMO to use Outlook for my email because despite all of Outlook's flaws, it is at least mostly usable. I actually had a coworker that left us and when she interviewed at her new company, she apparently checked to make sure they didn't use G Suite because it was a deal breaker.
- PascLeRasc 6y agoI make it a hobby to get mad at Google for personal use, but I've always loved using G Suite for work. Gmail is so much easier on the eyes and brain than Outlook, which is the only other company that exists to people with the title "Information Services Quality Director".
- syrrim 6y agoYou guys are such squares. Remember when they replaced the google logo? It was some serif thing, they smoothed it out and made it look more modern. It felt terrible at the time, but nowadays when I see the old logo, I have to laugh at how silly it looks. I can't help but feel that the entire reaction to this change is born of familiarity. The author practically admits as much when he recalls hating a change to the gmail logo, only to have it grow on him. The new logos are kind of cute, honestly. Here's to the new!
- disconcision 6y agoi am usually the last to complain about these kind of redesigns, but when my mail notification icon changes from a universally standard envelop to an awkwardly-styled M, i think it's fair to say something is off.
- throw_m239339 6y agoThese are more icons than logos, and they serve a very different (and functional) purpose.
- syrrim 6y agoThere exists monochrome icons. I don't think all the icons having the same color makes it all that much harder to distinguish them. More likely, you aren't used to the new icons, and will have to wait a couple days to adapt. Not the best thing in the world, but c'est la vie.
- anchpop 6y agoI totally agree. I think the new logos look nice and I don't have any issue distinguishing them by their silhouettes.
- jtsiskin 6y agoI usually agree, but these seem undeniably harder to distinguish between. Especially if small or you’re visually impaired: https://i.ibb.co/pR7cqxN/9-FA9147-E-A493-49-A2-A394-7-D0909-F61-B0-E.png https://i.ibb.co/pR7cqxN/9-FA9147-E-A493-49-A2-A394-7-D0909-...
- viburnum 6y agoI actually feel stressed out looking at the icons together, like it's a test I know I'm going to fail.
- dymax78 6y agoShame, I was always partial to the Drive penrose triangle. I thought the icon clearly and intrinsically communicated it's purpose, unless I'm missing something and looking at the new icon incorrectly.
- a9h74j 6y agoTry opening this Argonne page next to gmail. Later, you might think it was gdrive. https://www.anl.gov/article/could-argonnes-mini-nuclear-reactor-solve-the-etruck-recharging-dilemma https://www.anl.gov/article/could-argonnes-mini-nuclear-reac...
- IntFee588 6y agoWhen the intern learns figma.
- amatecha 6y agoI'll just share the phrase I think on an almost daily basis, when I see whatever latest thing has been changed for no reason: Change for the sake of change. This change provides exactly zero value to users, and in fact I see it as a step backwards, just as the article author suggests. The previous icon for Google Docs was clearly a _document_. The new one is essentially an abstract rectangle that I _might_ recognize as a document, if I am really paying close attention. The Hangouts icon previously conveyed the text chat nature with the speech bubble. This important distinction is gone, now implying that Hangouts is strictly a video chat platform.
- lyrrad 6y agoI think the new Docs icon is very similar to the old one: A blue rectangle. Chat's icon is two overlapping green speech bubbles. All the new icons appear to be on this page: https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
- bobbylarrybobby 6y agoThose aren’t all the new icons. The new docs icon is a four-colored hollow pentagon in the same shape as the current icon.
- lyrrad 6y agoI believe that's the icon that references all of Docs/Sheets/Slides/Keep/Sites/Forms, but not individual apps. I'm not sure where the four color rectangle is used, other than marketing material. The individual document types appear to have updated single-color icons. I see some of updated single color icons already in iOS (e.g. Docs/Sheets/Slides).
- makecheck 6y agoYeah, kinda reminds me of how Apple’s App Store icon morphed from three clear overlapping objects into just... matchsticks? Why must things become so flat and abstract that they look like nothing at all!?
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- soulofmischief 6y agoOne time I learned from Google's documentation that it was best not to spawn content after loading which affects page layout. Sometime in the last few years, Google started doing that very thing in their search results. After 1-3 seconds, sometimes a widget pops up which pushes all the search results down. I have countless times gone to click a URL after 2 seconds of searching and had it suddenly move and end up on a different website. It's incredibly disconcerting. Because of the inconsistency, I've become hesitant and scared to click anything for the first ten seconds of loading the page. I'm being habituated by negative stimulus. Nothing has ever made me want to ditch Google search more strongly because it's now literally giving me anxiety to view the search results. Anyone who was in charge at Google and had good design sense is long gone, and an empty-headed cargo cult remains. P.S. I organize my bookmarks bar by favicon color without labels. Gmail was fourth, after the EFF, Youtube, and SMBC. Now I will be kicking gmail to the end of the bar with the rest of the multi-colored icons which can't be sorted and remain indistinguishable from each other. I may be a small data point but Google just effectively killed their premium placement in my bookmarks which will lead to checking my web mail less frequently.
- montenegrohugo 6y agoFirst time I see this mentioned somewhere. YES - this exact same thing has driven me crazy. > Because of the inconsistency, I've become hesitant and scared to click anything for the first ten seconds of loading the page. I'm being habituated by negative stimulus. Nothing has ever made me want to ditch Google search more strongly because it's now literally giving me anxiety to view the search results. I resonate with this so much. It offends me in the worst way - it makes me waste my time. Not only when I search something, but on other places too! "Will the content change before I click or not? I don't know, so I better wait a few seconds". Even if a page is not an offender of doing this, I've already been conditioned into waiting. It's frustrating and it's infuriating. We have ever more powerful computers, and yet interfacing with them feels slower and slower.
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- techsin101 6y agoi looked at phone some days ago where i had all google apps... and i was thinking why do i have so much garbage installed... only later i realized it was gmail, i was looking at.
- duxup 6y agoLong ago Google was said to be obsessed with testing, to a fault sometimes. I can't imagine these would get past many tests of regular users as 'better'. I actually find them difficult to 'see'. Almost like there's a lack of definition on the edges to my eye.
- preommr 6y agoGoogle has shockingly bad UI/UX for a company of their size. For example, if you search something in google, click a link, and then go back to the search page, after a very small delay, google will open a small box changing of "people also searched for" that changes the layout of the site and pushes other results down. This violates so many important norms of ux design. I hate it because it leads me to misclicking when I am trying to go through a bunch of links to find the right information.
- varrock 6y agoI just tested this myself. Something tells me pushing the other results down is entirely intentionally. It lands my mouse perfectly on the next link.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y agoIf software can read your mind, but doesn’t know that you will act as if it can’t read your mind, then it can’t actually read your mind.
- droopyEyelids 6y agoOnce a company dominates a particular market, focusing on the user experience is bad for business. A company develops market dominance to extract profit from more-or-less captive customers. The dominance allows the organization to abandon the UI/UX without giving the customer a similar change to abandon the company.
- tweetle_beetle 6y agoThis is spot on. My personal reference example is Amazon. I'm consistenly amazed how the simple act of finding and buying a single product can become increasing unpleasant and difficult over time. Of course, I don't subscribe to Prime, have one-click purchasing activated, use their credit card, etc, etc. These completely artificial UX hurdles are just there to push further engagement with their ecosystem. It's reached the point that even a monstrosity like Aliexpress feels like a clear, organised, efficient shopping experience by comparison.
- starky 6y agoI use an iPad for taking video calls at work. Since they made the change a few weeks ago, it takes me 5 seconds every time I go to open Google Calendar for my meetings to find the icon on my dock. Half the time I end up clicking on the icon for Apollo since I'm so used to hitting a blue icon.
- sebmellen 6y agoThe alternative logos posted by a commenter on that article, Dan Parr, look much better! I don't know why they didn't go with something like those. Take a look: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xX8pKlUiSkG10-zIGZeKda5A9qfoZ08p/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xX8pKlUiSkG10-zIGZeKda5A9qf....
- qppo 6y agoThe color coordination is better but it doesn't address the big problem, which is that the geometry is too big
- sebmellen 6y agoUnless I'm misunderstanding your comment, it seems the old and new icons are just about the same size.
- qppo 6y agoThe feature sizes of the icons, as in the paths and shapes that make them up are too big. they're harder to discriminate when you shrink the icon down.
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoAgreed. The adjusted icons are better only when compared to the terrible icons Google released. They are all pretty bad though.
- noizejoy 6y ago> the geometry is too big I agree, and find it even more difficult to understand this design direction in our age of ever increasing screen resolutions.
- smexy 6y agoThe first row still looks best. Just tweak the Hangouts green and you're done.
- Ceezy 6y agoI'm not to sure why you would like to associate Gmail very popular and Hang out....
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- arihant 6y agoThese icons are obviously designed for mobile apps, and they look fine on app icons. But they are plain awful on the pinned tabs. I'm not sure if only a small percentage of GSuite customers were using web apps for them to justify this. Maybe they could have color coded these icons like Microsoft did for each product. I do like the shapes, I'm just having a hard time distinguishing them. So maybe they should have stuck with 100% red for mail and 100% green for google meet, and so on, with the new shapes. Or at least let the old color for the product be the dominant color of the icon.
- baby 6y agoIt has everything to do with the antitrust lawsuit. They must show that all their apps are part of a unique package.
- crb002 6y agoSo bad I couldn't find my gmail tab today. Tempted to write a chrome extension to put the old logo back for my sanity.
- sundvor 6y agoI spent ages looking for my Gmail on my Android phone this morning, until I saw it had been washed out. Previously an unmistakably strong RED icon, I do understand the value of it looking like all the other apps and that I really should learn to memorise the locations of my app rather than expect icons to look the same over time. And oh, how I love how they packed MEET into my Gmail app, so that I don't have to have that as a separate application. It saves a lot of time, because I start those all the time on my phone, and where better to do so than from my email? I also love the real estate it takes at the bottom of my email list, as I don't like that being used for the primary purpose of my email app - which used to be to display emails. My phone's display was too large anyway. Truly a _S_OLID effort by the Alphabet soup team. (EDIT: I did notice that hidden away in the settings, under each account, there's the option to toggle this feature off. I'm glad they made it intuitive should I ever decide to do so, and I'm sure I wouldn't have missed it the first time I looked for such an option, should I have desired to do so, and the 2nd as well).
- __alias 6y agoI actually like the direction they've gone in.. There's a lot of backlash EVERY time there are branding revamps, however in this situation I've been pretty receptive of the changes. The 'google' colour branding across their app icons is useful as users will instantly associate those colours with being Google's With my previous Android device I very clearly remember not being able to identify which Calendar app was Google's vs Samsung's. Additionally, I had no idea the old hangouts app icon was Google hangouts, as I never used it. But evidently the icon itself wasn't enough to get my attention as being Google's The only icon I don't like is the Google docs one as the icon itself doesn't really convey what it is. Atl east know it's obviously from the Google suite though.
- pgcj_poster 6y ago> The 'google' colour branding across their app icons is useful as users will instantly associate those colours with being Google's That seems a lot more useful to Google than it is to users.
- __alias 6y agoSure, which in that case I guess makes it a good design & business decision. As a user, I don't see any problem with that either
- 01100011 6y agoDammit... ok, which iPhone should I get? Recommendations for replacing Google photos, drive and GMail? There is an endless stream of bad decisions coming out of Mountain View these days and I think it's time I start de-Googling for real. I don't feel like going down with the ship.
- macintux 6y agoI’ve been a Fastmail customer as long as I can remember. Big fan, I can’t remember ever having any sort of outage or other serious problem. Not even minor ones.
- TheRealNGenius 6y agoThere is always Apple photos, iCloud, and apple mail
- gherkinnn 6y agoI use Protonmail and now Hey for mail. Protonmail is classic email and now has a calendar. And Hey is wonderful if you think of emails as mainly an annoyance.
- idank 6y agoThe cynicism towards the folks who worked on this at Google is a bit over the top in this thread. While most of the criticism is justified, I'd like to point out something that might not be obvious to folks who never worked at a megacorp: not every person who worked on this (or any other thing you have a problem with in tech) is a mindless zombie that makes change for the sake of change, whose only goal in life is to get promoted. This redesign likely took several human-years to get out. It's not perfect. It might even be plain bad in your world, and that's fine. But the idea that we're always smarter than the person next to us is just not a healthy place to be in my opinion. Assume good intent, you'll feel better about yourself and it'll spread to those around you as well.
- ananth22by7 6y agoI agree with you. There seems to be a lot of bad faith assuming going around on HN. It really degrades the quality of conversation we could be having. Look at the number of intelligent people on this platform! It’s incredible! Yet the cynicism is tiresome.
- wruza 6y agoIf you know the way, then please teach us. Because with time I somehow learned to ignore domestic/neighbor sounds, marketing calls, etc, but not when your damn workflow stutters because you cannot distinguish a stupid icon. It is not a cynicism, it is a natural confusion. You don't appreciate every thing in your life, do you?
- corobo 6y agoYou know how we sometimes mock Reddit for thinking it's an exclusive club? Welcome to the club
- rorykoehler 6y agoEvery time any major corp redesigns something it's the same old drivel on here. It's very predictable and imo flat out wrong. Design is subjective and everyone thinks their opinion is the right one when the reality is there is no right or wrong.
- yashap 6y agoI know it’s customary to complain about change, but ... this article is dead on. My company is full G-suite (sorry, “Google Workplace”), so I always have a bajillion mail/cal/drive/docs/meet tabs open. They used to be so easy to tell apart, now I have no idea WTF each tab is until I take a look. “Looks better” is subjective, but functionality is more objective, and these new logos are way less functional.
- subsaharancoder 6y agoThe Gmail logo looks like the Joomla one
- jiggawatts 6y agoThe first thing I noticed when I saw the new logo is that while it is animating, there is a single-pixel flickering line between the vertical legs of the "M": https://imgur.com/a/qRhvDSb https://imgur.com/a/qRhvDSb Clearly nobody tested this before pushing it to hundreds of millions of users!
- roryokane 6y agoI don’t see that line when loading Gmail in Firefox 82 on a Retina display.
- jiggawatts 6y agoFirefox 83b on a 4K display shows the flickering line. The Chromium-based Edge on the same computer however does not have the line. I'm guessing Google has reduced their QA testing on non-Chromium browsers...
- tqi 6y agoPeople always hate on new logos (see Instagram, Airbnb, Starbucks, etc [1]) and love to make big sweeping statements about how dumb/useless other people are. In 6 months no one will remember or care. [1] https://www.creativebloq.com/branding/controversial-4132378 https://www.creativebloq.com/branding/controversial-4132378
- poopchute 6y agoThey are easy enough to tell apart when you look at them full size on a desktop monitor. But when you have a couple google services open in different browser tabs, well now those very similar icons are pretty annoying to tell apart as 32x32 .ico
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- chansiky 6y agoI agree. Having come from the design world, pretty much most design critiques are bike sheds. Should the shed be red? no lets make it google colors instead. Make all sheds google colored because it will improve KPI's! (answer: it wont) There is no subjectivity to when anyone says new logos are bad. I remember people were saying Airbnb's logo looks like a dong, thats pretty much the worst you could do as a designer, and now no one even cares. In fact its recognizable and unique. Its like telling someone they have a bad face. Ok what if the face has a crooked nose? its not symmetrical? Does that even matter? If its distinguishable and recognizable that's all you need. At the end of the day its just branding. As long as you can get it to stick inside people's neurons then its doing its job.
- DamnInteresting 6y agoI am usually among the people who are excited about changes and updates in the products I use, but this is a rare exception. Some of these new logos are really hard to tell apart. It doesn't help that I have some red-green color blindness, but that's hardly a rare condition.
- stephc_int13 6y agoThey gave us one more reason to ditch Gmail. I also was very fond of the logo. The new one is completely generic.
- tsjq 6y agolooks like this is going into some UI/UX program lead's appraisal/promotion slide-deck. and then will be perfectly forgotten until next one seeks a promotion. :shrug:
- vzaliva 6y agoI have 3 pinned gmail tabs and the new icons are offensively flashy. Moreover, the number of unread messages is unreadable on such colorful background.
- tesseract 6y agoJust a few days ago I installed a third party launcher app, which allows changing/customizing app icons, on my Pixel phone. I had finally gotten sick of every other app icon being an indistinguishable white circle - with Google's apps being the worst offenders, since they all use the same mix of colors too.
- wodenokoto 6y agoEverybody hates new logos when they are released. Everybody hated the new Google logo. But you know what? It was a better logo and Google looks better for it. Maybe give this a few months and see if whether things feel more coherent or just blurred out before having your hissy fits about the downfall of gmail.
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- ithkuil 6y agoIf you have N "products" and you kill one, you "killed a product (again)!". If you have N "features" of a unified "workspace" product, of you "reorganize your features" you just "changed the product (again)!". People will complain about that, but no differently than how most of the products from most of the companies (including things like microsoft word) have behaved over time.
- aktuel 6y agoTechcrunch is a horribly bloated website.
- makach 6y agoResponding to the title, it's subjective because I like them.
- mcv 6y agoMy first impression of these logos compared to the old ones, is that the old ones represented the application (they look like mail, a calendar, a document and a camera in a speech bubble; only Drive doesn't look like anything). The new logos represent the company: you primarily see the Google colours. They look less like what the application does. If they wanted more google branding, more recognisability that these are all apps from Google without undermining the recognisability of what the app itself does, maybe they should have left the logos as they were, but added some consistent Google colours as a border or background. Then you can recognise them as mail, but from Google, calendar, but from Google, documents, but from Google. Now they're all just "some Google thing".
- WhoIsSatoshi 6y agoCan Brave start working on its own search engine already? B. Eich has been one of the few saviors trying to rescue us from Google - Everyone who understands what is going on is trying to leave, but there are no better options out there yet!
- BrendanEich 6y agoWe are approaching this in steps. Can’t say more now, hope to soon.
- kristaps 6y agoRemember any corporate rebranding where the press went "hey, this is pretty good actually"? Me neither. My guess is that people just hate change and will rationalize why old>new.
- mikelward 6y agoMasterCard, AirBnB, and BP are the only ones I can find.
- dgudkov 6y agoI suppose we're dealing with a new design trend here, multiple colors are supposed to mean inclusivity. Probably not so coincidentally, Facebook Messenger's icon also became multi-color.
- JorgeGT 6y agoNot only the icon, but the messages now have a color gradient that changes when scrolling as well... it's really strange.
- rob74 6y agoQuote of the day: "[...] if you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of your favorite Google products will float by. Better not to get attached." My most recent defunct Google product: the Google Play Music app. A perfectly serviceable ad-free app to play my MP3 file collection - I'm an old-skool kind of guy, I was using the app only in "offline mode", without a subscription to the streaming service. I got some nag screens to subscribe from time to time, but other than that, it was great. Until Google decided to cancel the service in favor of an abomination called YouTube Music. And, of course, it couldn't just let the app work in offline mode without the service, it had to disable it via an update. Fortunately you can still use it by installing an old (hopefully unmodified) APK downloaded from one of the various (hopefully trustworthy) sites and disabling updates for the app. But let's see the bright side: maybe this will give the various music players created by individual developers a boost...
- secondcoming 6y agoThey're just visual noise. I have to concentrate on the app's logo to see what it is. Nothing just 'jumps out'. It's awful.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoI think that the new Google Docs icon is confusing but I like the rest. Overall, I think the rebranded GSuite as Google Workspace is a good product. Even though I also pay for ProtonMail and FastMail, Google Workspace is my driver at home (largely because of how useful I find Cloud Search), and at work.
- FrojoS 6y agoIn the past couple months I've often had problems with Gmail and/or Calendar disconnecting or not loading (using Chrome). For instance Gmail times out. GCalendar is unresponsive when I try to create a new entry. Anyone having the same issue? I used to love both services, but this issue makes me want to switch.
- m-p-3 6y agoI had all the Google tools I use in my bookmark toolbar without any titles, and the previous icons made it easy to distinguish them. Now it's just a mess and I'm back to adding a title to each of them, losing space when a single icon worked.
- nojvek 6y agoWhoever got promoted for driving icon change across Google Products, Congrats! Not sure how google is making decisions nowadays, but this seems like a change being made for the sake of change.
- mitchdoogle 6y agoWhy is a writer with no professional design experience offering up a critique like this? I'm tired of seeing design criticism that is entirely subjective from people with no credibility. This kind of thing shows up with any logo or design change in products created by major tech companies. It's completely condescending towards the professional designers who worked on the changes and completely ignorant of the entire process (i.e. business goals, discussions, meetings, research, testing) that was taken to arrive with these new icons. The author tries to sound scientific several times with sentences like, "having a distinct color is important to type and design in lots of ways" or "Darker colors pop more against a white background than yellow or the tiny bit of red, making the icons seem to have heavy “L” aspects to them" but he doesn't offer us any further information. Why is a distinct color important? Why can't a group of colors be distinct, maybe even more distinct than a single color? Does he think the design team at Google hasn't thought of everything that is brought up here, or that they haven't done user research to actually determine if the icons are difficult to distinguish? If the author is going to make claims about these things being hard to see, then he should present his own user research. Without something to back up their claims, articles like this just reek of stubborn grumpiness - something people use everyday is slightly different and they thought it was just fine before! Eventually they get used to the new thing and the process will repeat itself with the next rebranding.
- thiht 6y agoJust because these logos were made by professionals doesn't make them inherently good. They suck, and all the points made by the article are valid, especially the fact that they're now non differentiable, and the fact this was overlooked by said professionals is shameful.
- adultSwim 6y agoI like them, especially Mail
- poutrathor 6y ago> and you can recognize colors easily even in your peripheral vision. That's not true as far as I know. I think we see color only in the middle of our focal and our brain merely remember colors for the periphery. > They are typically 40–50 µm long, and their diameter varies from 0.5 to 4.0 µm, being smallest and most tightly packed at the center of the eye at the fovea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell#Shape_and_arrangement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell#Shape_and_arrangemen...
- jrys 6y agoThe Tab Modifier extension plus adBlock to block the logo on the page did the trick for me.