Google has really sniffed out with new logos for his "reimagining" of G Suite such as Google Workspace, replacing icons that are familiar, recognizable and, in Gmail's case, iconic if you will, with little rainbow blobs that now everyone will struggle to distinguish in their cards. Companies always talk loud and long about their design language and choices, so as an antidote I thought I'd explain simply why these new ones are bad and probably won't last.
First of all I have to say that I understand Google's intent here, to unify the visual language of the various apps in its suite. This can be important, especially with a company like Google, ditching apps, services, design languages, and other things like the ballast of a sinking hot-air balloon (an extraordinarily appropriate comparison, in fact).
We've seen so many Google icon languages over the years that it's hard to get yourself to bother with new ones. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, if you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of your favorite Google products will float. Better not to get attached.
But sometimes they do something so foolish that it is up to anyone who cares to throw the justification of society in the face and tell them they have rejected it; The last time I worried enough was with Google Reader. Since me and a hundred million other people will have to stare at these horrible new icons all day until they retire them, maybe making some noise will speed up that timeline a bit.
Sorry if I leave a little prose here, but I consider it an antidote to the endless design stories that almost without exception are always accompanied by reckless redesigns. I'll limit the discussion of how these icons go wrong to three general ways: color, shape, and branding.
Color
Color is one of the first things you notice about something and you can easily recognize colors in your peripheral vision as well. So having a distinct color is important for writing and designing in many ways. Why do you think companies are so crazy about all those different shades of blue?
This is one of the reasons why the most popular Google app icons are so easily distinguishable. Gmail's red color is more than ten years old and Calendar's blue is pretty old too. Meet's teal probably should have stayed green, like its Hangouts predecessor, but it's at least somewhat distinct. Likewise Keep (remember Keep?) And a handful of other minor actors. More importantly, they're solid, except for a few that were better for their colors, like Maps, before his icon was murdered.
There are two problems with the colors of the new icons. The first is that they don't really have colors. They all to have all colors, which just outside the bat makes it harder to distinguish them at a glance. Remember, you will never see this large as in the image above. More often they will be more than this size:
Maybe even smaller. And never so close. I don't know about you, but I can't tell them apart when I'm not looking at them directly. What are you looking for exactly? They all have all colors, and not even in the same order or direction - see how some are red, yellow, green, blue and one is red, yellow, blue, green? Three (with Gmail) clockwise and two also counterclockwise. It seems unimportant, but your eyes focus on things like that, but maybe just enough More confused. Maybe it would have been better if they all started with red on the top left or something, and went on bicycles. They don't randomize the order of colors in the main Google logo, right? Ultimately, these little blobs resemble toys or candy wrappers. At best it's plaid, and that's Slack's territory.
At first I thought the little red triangular tabs were a nice visual indicator, but somehow they messed that up too. Each icon should have the tab in a different corner, but Calendar and Drive both have it in the lower right. They're different types of triangles, I suppose - it's a tribute to trigonometry.
You will also notice that the icons have a kind of lopsided weight. This is because on a light background, different colors have different visual relevance. Darker colors stand out more against a white background than yellow or a bit of red, making the icons appear to have heavy "L" appearances, left in Gmail and Calendar, bottom left in Drive and Meet, in bottom right in Documents. But in an inactive tab, the light color will be more noticeable and the L ones will appear to be on the other sides.
Form
This is a good follow up in form problems, because the perceived shape of these icons will change depending on the background. The original icons solved this problem by having a solid shape unique to them and the background didn't really leak out. You have to be very careful with the transparent parts of your design: positive and negative space and everything in between. If you give any part of your logo to the background, you are at the whim of the user interface or theme chosen by the user. Will these logos look good with a hole in the middle that looks at a dark gray inactive tab? Or will the hole be filled with white, making it a positive space if on a dark background and a negative if on a white background?
However, the problem with these icons is that their shapes are bad. They're all blank, and four are rectangular if you include Gmail's negative space (and we do, Google taught us to). The overall shape of a container is perfectly good, but at a glance four of them are basically just corner ORs. Do you want the tall O, the pointed one or one of the two square O's with slightly different color patterns? From a distance who can tell? Only now do they look like what they should do if you look closely.
Come to think of it, those shapes really scream Office and Bing too, right? Not good!
While we're at it, the thin open-space type of the Calendar is pretty anemic compared to the big thick border, right? Maybe they should have gone with the bold.
Finally, the overlapping colors create trouble. First, it makes the Drive logo look like a biohazard symbol. But it adds a lot of complexity that is difficult to follow on a small scale. The original Drive logo had three colors, sure, and some shading so you can see it was a Moebius strip that implied infinity and not just a triangle (that's gone too - so why keep the triangle?) - but the colors trigger each other: blue and yellow make green, two primary and their secondary.
The new ones have all three primary, one secondary and two tertiary (if you count darkness as color). They do not help forms exist in any identifiable way. Are you watching them? It does not seem right. They bend, but how? Are the strips made of twist? I do not think so. Forms are not things: they are just arrangements, suggestions of things that once were, removed a step too far.
Brand
Google is no stranger to throwing value in the trash. But you'd think they sometimes recognize when they have a good thing to do. The Gmail logo was a good thing. I have to say I preferred the old angular when they switched to the rounded icon a few years ago, but it grew on me. The natural "M" shape of an envelope is emphasized so well and the red and white color is so instantly recognizable and legible - this is the kind of logo you hold onto for a long, long time. Or not!
The problem here is that now Gmail, which has essentially operated as a completely invincible brand for more than a decade (which is eons in tech, not to mention tech logos), has been put on an equal footing with other services that don't. they are as reliable or widely used.
Now Gmail is just another rainbow shape in a sea of very similar rainbow shapes, which tells the user "This service is not special to us. This is not the service that has worked so well for you, for so long. This is just a finger on the hand of an Internet giant. And now you can never see one without thinking about the other. "
Same with all the rest of these little color wheels - you'll never forget that they're all part of the same apparatus that knows everything you are looking for, every site you visit, and now everything you do at work. Oh, they're very nice about it. But make no mistake, homogeneous branding (despite all its chromatic heterogeneity) is the prelude to a brand crunch in which you are no longer just a Gmail user, you are at Google's home, all day, every day.
"This is where we free ourselves from defining the structure and role of our offerings in terms invented by someone else in a very different era," Javier Soltero, VP of Google, told Fast Company.
The message is clear: Enough with the old - the things that built your trust; and with the new - the things that benefit from your confidence.