The original icons solved this by having a solid shape unique to them, and the background didn’t really leak through. This is a good segue into the shape problems, because the perceived shape of these icons will change depending on the background. You can tell because they all have really small features that will be lost to aliasing when they’re 20 pixels wide.
#Logos web app updates android
My guess is the design team spent a lot of time looking at these logos at a fairly large size, and didn’t think too hard about how they’d look in actual use on the screen a cheap Chromebook or Android phone. But in an inactive tab, the light color will be more salient, and those L’s will seem to be on the other sides. 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, on the left in Gmail and Calendar, bottom left in Drive and Meet, bottom right in Docs. That’s because against a light background, different colors have different visual salience. You’ll also notice that the icons have a sort of lopsided weight. They’re different kinds of triangles, at least - but that’s a freebie from trigonometry. Each icon could have had the tab in a different corner, but Calendar and Drive both have it on the bottom right. At best it’s plaid, and that’s Slack territory.Īt first I thought the little red triangular tabs were a nice visual indicator, but somehow they messed that up too. They don’t randomize the order of the colors in the main Google logo, right? Ultimately these little blobs just resemble toys or crunched up candy wrappers. Maybe these would have been better if they all started with red in the top left or something, and cycled through. Sounds unimportant but your eye picks up on stuff like that, maybe just enough that you’re more confused. What exactly are you looking for? They all have every color, and not even in the same order or direction - you see how some are red, yellow, green, blue and one is red, yellow, blue, green? Three (with Gmail) clockwise and two anti-clockwise, too. I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell them apart when I’m not looking directly at them. Remember, you’re never going to see them super big like in the image at the top. They all have all the colors, which just right off the bat makes it harder to tell them apart at a glance. First is that they don’t really have colors. There are two problems with the colors of the new icons. More importantly, they’re solid - except for a few that were better for their colors, like Maps, before its icon got assassinated. Likewise Keep (remember Keep?) and a handful of other lesser actors. The teal of Meet probably should have just stayed green, like its predecessor Hangouts, but it’s at least somewhat distinct. Gmail’s red color goes back a decade and more, and Calendar’s blue is pretty old as well. That’s part of why the icons of the most popular Google apps are so easily distinguished. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, if you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of your favorite Google products will float by. We’ve seen so many Google icon languages over the years that it’s hard to bring oneself to care about new ones. That can be important, especially with a company like Google, which abandons apps, services, design languages, and other things like ballast out of a sinking hot air balloon (a remarkably apt comparison, in fact). Companies always talk loud and long about their design language and choices, so as an antidote I thought I’d just explain why these new ones are bad and probably won’t last.įirst I should say that I understand Google’s intent here, to unify the visual language of the various apps in its suite. Google really whiffed with the new logos for its “reimagination” of G Suite as Google Workspace, replacing icons that are familiar, recognizable, and in Gmail’s case iconic if you will, with little rainbow blobs that everyone will now struggle to tell apart in their tabs.