This 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.
I 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.
“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.
You 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.
Nah, 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.
It 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”
This 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.
“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.
Yep, perfectly describes the stereotypical useless executive that wants to show results by making some surface level modification. I often see it where I work at a lower level with new managers who want to rename the departments under them. It means they can immediately say in their first performance review "I created department X!".
Part of the way I identify good managers is by whether or not they do such a thing, or whether they wait a year to fully understand things before making more substantive changes. Or you know just running things normally, looking for those incremental improvements that add up over time in a bigger way.
I knew some game developers who put one or two glaringly bad visual choices in each milestone deliverable so the publisher could say "Change X!" and they feel like they'd made their mark.
That left the rest of the build mostly unscathed from input from the publisher. As I heard it told it was a fairly successful approach.
You’d be surprised how often this works - especially when there’s a wide discrepancy of expertise between the person doing the work and the person approving and/or paying for the work and the latter feel compelled to put their stamp on the work.
> I knew some game developers who put one or two glaringly bad visual choices in each milestone deliverable so the publisher could say "Change X!" and they feel like they'd made their mark.
> That left the rest of the build mostly unscathed from input from the publisher. As I heard it told it was a fairly successful approach.
David Siegel in Secrets of Successful Websites (1997) called them "neck bolts".
Somebody else... who knew what they were doing by having functional icons that are differentiable. Next redesign they will make them oblique for another $1M.
The docs, calendar and meet icons were uninspired. Redoing those make sense, but I suspect that the thematic element of the color overlaps could have been done with more symmetry. The asymmetric elements don’t act as an interesting accent. They are headed in the right direction, just needs a few more iterations of tweaking.
Anyways, gradients are a lost art sadly. They’ll be back eventually.
Edit:
How the fuck did this get a downvote? This place is getting absurd. Don’t down vote opinions you disagree with. Downvote a curse-laden rant that off puts you instead.
haha yeah they don't have to, but there's just some good examples of "inspired" icons out there and it's kind of sad Google didn't take the chance to do something similar. The Microsoft office icons, for example, I'd call clear/differentiable and inspired. You get the cool detail that the shape for each is associated with the document type they edit (tables, text, graphics, email/calendar) subtle gradients, depth through great use of shadows, and even on apps that are technically the same color (blue is used for 3 apps) subtle yet noticeable changes in hue [1].
There's also macOS icons, especially the older ones. There's many examples icons with wonderful uses of texture, depth and detail, many of which altogether break away from the trend of "one color per app" but still manage to stay unique and, well, iconic [2].
It would've been great to see something with a little more effort and "inspiration" from google, although yeah, at least something clear and distinguishable would've been good.
No, seriously, why would anyone even care that they're "inspired"? Icons are not supposed to communicate aesthetic wonder or make you think about life, they're supposed to indicate something very, very clearly.
I think the miscommunication here is that clear, identifiable and function-representative visual guides are hard to design, so some people (especially those who have attempted that challenge) are inspired by the ones that do all three (while being aesthetically acceptable, the right amount of eye-catching, matching the overall brand image, whatever other standards have you).
Does he mention having a lifelong grudge against people with vision problems? Because that's the first thing I thought of when I saw them. That someone at Google viscerally hates the visually-impaired.
FWIW, I'm also visually impaired and mystified that this very critical article even exists and further befuddled that it resonates with enough people that it has made the front page of HN.
I don't get where all the hatred is coming from beyond the knee jerk reaction that most humans hate to change. Most people tend to hate change and tend to react negatively to anything being changed.
> I don't get where all the hatred is coming from beyond the knee jerk reaction that most humans hate to change.
From the way I see it, the logos are just plain ugly. When they changed the logo before, I don't remember having an issue with it. https://1000logos.net/gmail-logo/
Because every single user of a product that changes for no reason pays a price. That total cost is very high and never considered nor paid by the VP who will quickly move on.
For good redesigns, you’ll come out positive soon enough. For bad ones, never.
The move betrays the attitude that their users are not really seen or respected as human. It’s the same reason you can’t contact a human for support even if your entire digital existence gets algorithm’ed out of existence.
> I don't get where all the hatred is coming from beyond the knee jerk reaction that most humans hate to change. Most people tend to hate change and tend to react negatively to anything being changed.
This is the same speech I give after I spraypaint graffiti on people's houses.
The information that "most people just hate change on principle" -- in fact, they typically see change as loss -- was a lesson learned from my spiffy corporate training when I worked for a Fortune 500 company and before I could even begin my entry level job, I first underwent three months of training. Among other things, this three months of training involved completing a certificate program in a single month by attending class 7.5 hours a day at a local technical college instead of going to the job site.
It was world class training. I imagine it's pretty solid information even before you take into account how well it fits with firsthand experience that most people just haaaaaaate change on principle, even if it turns out to be the right thing to do and they later decide it was for the best.
On a colored titlebar, as you might find in a web browser for example, the new icons accomplish the feat of having at least one nearly invisible color no matter what color the titlebar is. And they don't have any fill to provide contrast, so the shape is lost. On my titlebars (darkish blue) the new gmail logo loses the blue and the green, so it looks like a dead worm.
The original gmail logo was awesome. Clean, recognizable, clever, easy to integrate. Everything about it was incredibly well designed. I'll miss it.
Well, perhaps we are conflating two facts inaccurately..
The TechCrunch article says "First I should say that I understand Google’s intent here, to unify the visual language of the various apps in its suite."
The need for redesign is justified, it might as well have been kickstarted by the new person on the big seat who probably due to his fresh perspective could put this in motion; but the execution and the end result did not turn out great.
However "useless" VPs are in general (debatable in this case - Javier Soltero has a great track record), this exercise would have been easily seen as a great step forward if the results were good and received great press.
“Understanding intent” is a far cry from justified.
I understand the intent for airlines to be profitable. It does not mean that I would find putting all of the passengers in coffins for easier transport to be justified.
I'm not sure about the 'excellent' part of the execution. The previous icons gave you more of an idea of what you were clicking on. The Word icon showed a W and a sheet of papers with lines on it. Now, it's just a W on a striped background. Excel is an X. You have know before hand the name of every MS tool to figure out what the icons stand for. Which is OK for workers experienced with the Office tool suite, but for others, W and X are no clearer than Y or T.
So, if the idea behind icons is to quickly locate the tools you need, even if you are not super-familiar with the tools, I think the previous icons served that purpose much better.
Those are some of the most confusing icons I've ever seen. WTF is Y with a few arcs?
Even if I had memorized what every icon means, I can't tell them apart without looking closely because most have the same shape and similar colors. "Everything looks the same" is not good design.
To each their own but I found their new redesign to be excellent and as someone who uses a fair number of their products, I've never had any issues differentiating one from another based on their icons.
For starters, each product has a distinct icon color, which in and of itself makes a huge difference in usability and the ability to quickly determine which icon to click. This is something the Google redesign fails completely on.
Secondly, every element behind the single-letter in each MS icon has distinctive elements that are related to the product. Excel actually has grid-cells to mimic worksheets in a minimalist fashion. Powerpoint has the pie-chart. One-Note has the fantastic minimalist binder with tabs in the background.
Between the unique color and graphical elements associated with each product, there is plenty that helps a user easily distinguish one from the other while they all still have a cohesive aesthetic.
I find it to be an outstanding redesign. In comparison, the Google redesign basically has almost none of the benefits above and makes it a lot harder to distinguish icons at a glance.
OMG the first thing I thought when I saw the title was "probable VP Urination Syndrome." And apparently it's true. He probably paid a prestigious design firm a million dollars for this shite.
People with expensive price tags need to come up with larger and larger projects to justify their own price tags, especially when you are dealing with things like logo redesigns, which are near impossible to tie to actual revenue of a business.
The culture starts at the top. It's the CEO who is accountable whether the org large or small.
With a sprawling org like Google I sometimes wonder how you could ever expect the CEO to be fully engaged on all of it. It is probably just impossible. The best companies seem to involve a certain passion and enthusiasm on the part of the CEO.
I don't think so, I actually think he might be pretty clever.
I thought the same thing you did when I read Javier Soltero's quotes in this article, so I dug into him a bit. If you look into what he's been saying for awhile, you'll see this is all part of an effort to integrate Google applications. He's given several interviews where he's stated this pretty plainly, and I actually buy it. Think about it--over the last few months we've all been seeing that if, push comes to shove, remote work is 100% possible for a lot of IT businesses. If he manages to successfully integrate Gmail, Hangouts Chat, and Hangouts Meet, he effectively uses Google's brand and engineering knowledge to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams and targets this market directly as opposed to letting their various products fall behind how people are actually using productivity tools. He's making Google's products actually compelling to use by focusing on integrating them (Apple's core strength) and making them smart enough to feel as though they get the work you're doing (Google's strength, by sheer ML dominance).
They also get a cool remote work solution to use with their own employees alongside all of their existing infra that lets them allow remote employees to interact with Google securely, or at least auditably (BeyondCorp, CitC, whatever the internal code review tool and browser-based text editor were called, etc). This makes remote work for them possible and extremely cost saving, as the solution they'd otherwise need to engineering is already being developed as an external product.
I know nothing about law, but I'm also willing to bet making them integrated would also help them defend against the antitrust investigation too. If they roll up all of these seemingly separate products into one offering, by the time the investigation comes to any conclusions they might be so integrated they could argue they can't be split. Then if the government decides to do it anyways they'll probably split along the Google Search and Google Cloud lines, leaving at least two separate but extremely profitable business units. Each of those business units is even competing with at least two other established companies too!
The icon rebranding is probably part of making the integration visual . They know we'll all forget about it eventually just like they did last time when they altered the Google logo to use a sans-serif font and everyone lost their minds. Javier's strategy builds value for the company not only directly by entering the productivity tool market, but he also saves the company money by giving Google a free option for sustaining a fully remote workforce that they can now pay less and not need to maintain offices for. He also uses his inside knowledge of Microsoft to compete with his largest direct competitor, and simply dwarfs slack in both financial resources and brand capital. Finally, he might even help Google in the antitrust suit.
It's also possible I'm an idiot and thinking too much into yet another useless VP's attempts to distinguish himself in a marginal way. I personally think they have a winner here though; they're hugely committed to a browser-based environment and even stand to control web browsers and http altogether with Chromium's dominance and the amount of work they're dumping into the stuff it talks to. It's a fairly positive and mature future, and speaks to the kind of leadership you get from people who focus on building value rather than building technology.
Google'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.
Really 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.
My 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.
I 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!”
According 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.
I don't think the parent meant this literal situation to work out.
It's more like building a passive perception of belonging-together over a prolonged period of time, where this is only one step of many, resulting in a subtle shifting of the framing when the discussion happens.
Posed as a more general question: In what ways can a company that handles the information flow of lawmakers (personal info, browsing habits, software updates, etc) can influence their acting by psychological backdoors?
These 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.
This 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.
And 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.
They 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 :)
Monochrome 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.
>> 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?
It 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.
That'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.
Notion 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.
I just gave this a test trying to find google drive as fast as possible. My eyes first stopped on google home since it’s the exact same colours and mostly the same shape.
It never had a publicly documented API, wish I could have baked it into VS Code and such. Obviously not a clear indicator of a Google offering with a limited time left, but cause enough for concern for me to prepare to find an alternative...
Exactly this. I used to export everything by opening the page source and filtering out the HTML elements. It was a really terrible offering, and it was originally what made me realize that Google is not the kind of company that delivers on that front.
I replaced it with a combination of Shaarli for links and Standard Notes for everything else.
My goal for the last year was to be off as many google services as possible by the end of next year, and they've been making it surprisingly easy for me. All I really had left at this point was Google Play Music and Google Keep (apart from android itself and gmail, which I'm working on). If they phase these two products out, they will have alienated me out of every product of theirs I've ever used. They're already consolidating google play with youtube music (which is bizarre to me).
The hardest to cut will probably be gmail, but the fact that they slip advertisements into my inboxes has been pretty motivating. Youtube is also difficult, but as a resource it seems to somehow become less and less useful to me every year. I know that subscribing to youtube channels via RSS and using a program to automatically download the videos doesn't count as 'not using youtube,' but these days I'm starting to feel like content creators will get there eventually wrt video hosting alternatives
In 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.
I’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.
I 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.
So 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.
I'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.
I’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.
> Lots of random projects, often killed, little direction
This is what happened inside Yahoo as it was imploding. Every team wanted their own dev library/graphics/app style to "win" internally. It resulted in very arrogant dev & project leads fighting with each other for no customer benefit.
It's the same in Academia though. "In the heart of every Vice Chancellor lies an Architect". Gotta build a new building so you can put your name on it.
I'd say in many ways it's the same, but with one key difference. While administrators are fighting to push their visions, many faculty members tune out, do whatever work it is they want to do, and pretty much ignore what is going on overall at their institutions.
If you read Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle of Higher Education, then you can read accounts of university leaders who were brought in to push for big changes, who boldly announced a change of direction, ... and who were simply ignored and then quit.
It's wild how much good association I have with Microsoft right now. I never think of masssive companies in positive ways usually. I had to catch myself when a friend brought them up and I wanted to talk about how much I like VSCode, WSL, and Typescript. I know there's probably a good chance it's the embrace, extend, extinguish but damn the embrace phase is nice
Office 365, OneDrive, Azure, Teams and all the other things they've been doing online with effectively single-sign on are having amazing synergy between them (in my opinion). I think people are massively under-appreciating what they're building towards. MS is taking over slowly in the background.
I agree. Office 365 family plan is a great deal. My personal workflow centers on Google Workspace, but if Google were to disappear tomorrow, it would only take a few hours to switch to Office 365 being my driver for personal information, writing materials, etc.
Somehow they don't see this problem, which is a severe blind spot. If they end up on the wrong end of their anti-trust issues when the dust settles, the only part that might be viable long term is search/ads.
> Google knows it's really just a "Lab" experiment.
The change seems happened during the time when Google was switching focus away from "been cool" to profitability. The business reason behind it was probably that Google don't want leak any hit about what they were up to, because a leak may cost a major growth opportunity that is unknown to them when they started the experiment.
So now (to keep the OP's picture) they throw the spaghetti full swing every time. If it sticks to the wall, it's ok (for now), if it doesn't (or not well enough), it gets mopped up, no harm done to the business - except, as the OP wrote, for users who get wary to rely on stuff that may or may not be here next year.
>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...
As 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.
Haha 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.
Yeah, 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.
They 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Ugh, 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.
I 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".
You 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!
i 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.
There 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.
343 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadOf 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.
One of those three is not like the others. I bet you can guess where my mind doesn't go first.
....and yet I kept closing and swiping to other screens, swiping back before I realized “oh wait it’s right there”
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.
Is what GP refers too
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.
Yep, perfectly describes the stereotypical useless executive that wants to show results by making some surface level modification. I often see it where I work at a lower level with new managers who want to rename the departments under them. It means they can immediately say in their first performance review "I created department X!".
Part of the way I identify good managers is by whether or not they do such a thing, or whether they wait a year to fully understand things before making more substantive changes. Or you know just running things normally, looking for those incremental improvements that add up over time in a bigger way.
That left the rest of the build mostly unscathed from input from the publisher. As I heard it told it was a fairly successful approach.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality?Reposting#Re...
> That left the rest of the build mostly unscathed from input from the publisher. As I heard it told it was a fairly successful approach.
David Siegel in Secrets of Successful Websites (1997) called them "neck bolts".
- Google, probably
Anyways, gradients are a lost art sadly. They’ll be back eventually.
Edit:
How the fuck did this get a downvote? This place is getting absurd. Don’t down vote opinions you disagree with. Downvote a curse-laden rant that off puts you instead.
Now, fucking downvote it.
These icons are neither.
haha yeah they don't have to, but there's just some good examples of "inspired" icons out there and it's kind of sad Google didn't take the chance to do something similar. The Microsoft office icons, for example, I'd call clear/differentiable and inspired. You get the cool detail that the shape for each is associated with the document type they edit (tables, text, graphics, email/calendar) subtle gradients, depth through great use of shadows, and even on apps that are technically the same color (blue is used for 3 apps) subtle yet noticeable changes in hue [1].
There's also macOS icons, especially the older ones. There's many examples icons with wonderful uses of texture, depth and detail, many of which altogether break away from the trend of "one color per app" but still manage to stay unique and, well, iconic [2].
It would've been great to see something with a little more effort and "inspiration" from google, although yeah, at least something clear and distinguishable would've been good.
[1]: https://systechinfo.com/microsoft-rolls-out-updated-office-i...
[2]: https://img.utdstc.com/screen/3/official-macosx-leopard-icon...
They do not need to inspire me. I do not need my UI to be fashionable. I do not _want_ my UI to eschew function in favour of style.
They're awful.
I don't get where all the hatred is coming from beyond the knee jerk reaction that most humans hate to change. Most people tend to hate change and tend to react negatively to anything being changed.
From the way I see it, the logos are just plain ugly. When they changed the logo before, I don't remember having an issue with it. https://1000logos.net/gmail-logo/
For good redesigns, you’ll come out positive soon enough. For bad ones, never.
The move betrays the attitude that their users are not really seen or respected as human. It’s the same reason you can’t contact a human for support even if your entire digital existence gets algorithm’ed out of existence.
This is the same speech I give after I spraypaint graffiti on people's houses.
It was world class training. I imagine it's pretty solid information even before you take into account how well it fits with firsthand experience that most people just haaaaaaate change on principle, even if it turns out to be the right thing to do and they later decide it was for the best.
https://i.imgur.com/eI7Bczd.png
The original gmail logo was awesome. Clean, recognizable, clever, easy to integrate. Everything about it was incredibly well designed. I'll miss it.
The TechCrunch article says "First I should say that I understand Google’s intent here, to unify the visual language of the various apps in its suite."
The need for redesign is justified, it might as well have been kickstarted by the new person on the big seat who probably due to his fresh perspective could put this in motion; but the execution and the end result did not turn out great.
However "useless" VPs are in general (debatable in this case - Javier Soltero has a great track record), this exercise would have been easily seen as a great step forward if the results were good and received great press.
“Understanding intent” is a far cry from justified.
I understand the intent for airlines to be profitable. It does not mean that I would find putting all of the passengers in coffins for easier transport to be justified.
If that is not clear, here is an example of Microsoft Office's excellent execution: https://medium.com/microsoft-design/redesigning-the-office-a...
So, if the idea behind icons is to quickly locate the tools you need, even if you are not super-familiar with the tools, I think the previous icons served that purpose much better.
Even if I had memorized what every icon means, I can't tell them apart without looking closely because most have the same shape and similar colors. "Everything looks the same" is not good design.
For starters, each product has a distinct icon color, which in and of itself makes a huge difference in usability and the ability to quickly determine which icon to click. This is something the Google redesign fails completely on.
Secondly, every element behind the single-letter in each MS icon has distinctive elements that are related to the product. Excel actually has grid-cells to mimic worksheets in a minimalist fashion. Powerpoint has the pie-chart. One-Note has the fantastic minimalist binder with tabs in the background.
Between the unique color and graphical elements associated with each product, there is plenty that helps a user easily distinguish one from the other while they all still have a cohesive aesthetic.
I find it to be an outstanding redesign. In comparison, the Google redesign basically has almost none of the benefits above and makes it a lot harder to distinguish icons at a glance.
With a sprawling org like Google I sometimes wonder how you could ever expect the CEO to be fully engaged on all of it. It is probably just impossible. The best companies seem to involve a certain passion and enthusiasm on the part of the CEO.
I thought the same thing you did when I read Javier Soltero's quotes in this article, so I dug into him a bit. If you look into what he's been saying for awhile, you'll see this is all part of an effort to integrate Google applications. He's given several interviews where he's stated this pretty plainly, and I actually buy it. Think about it--over the last few months we've all been seeing that if, push comes to shove, remote work is 100% possible for a lot of IT businesses. If he manages to successfully integrate Gmail, Hangouts Chat, and Hangouts Meet, he effectively uses Google's brand and engineering knowledge to compete with Slack and Microsoft Teams and targets this market directly as opposed to letting their various products fall behind how people are actually using productivity tools. He's making Google's products actually compelling to use by focusing on integrating them (Apple's core strength) and making them smart enough to feel as though they get the work you're doing (Google's strength, by sheer ML dominance).
They also get a cool remote work solution to use with their own employees alongside all of their existing infra that lets them allow remote employees to interact with Google securely, or at least auditably (BeyondCorp, CitC, whatever the internal code review tool and browser-based text editor were called, etc). This makes remote work for them possible and extremely cost saving, as the solution they'd otherwise need to engineering is already being developed as an external product.
I know nothing about law, but I'm also willing to bet making them integrated would also help them defend against the antitrust investigation too. If they roll up all of these seemingly separate products into one offering, by the time the investigation comes to any conclusions they might be so integrated they could argue they can't be split. Then if the government decides to do it anyways they'll probably split along the Google Search and Google Cloud lines, leaving at least two separate but extremely profitable business units. Each of those business units is even competing with at least two other established companies too!
The icon rebranding is probably part of making the integration visual . They know we'll all forget about it eventually just like they did last time when they altered the Google logo to use a sans-serif font and everyone lost their minds. Javier's strategy builds value for the company not only directly by entering the productivity tool market, but he also saves the company money by giving Google a free option for sustaining a fully remote workforce that they can now pay less and not need to maintain offices for. He also uses his inside knowledge of Microsoft to compete with his largest direct competitor, and simply dwarfs slack in both financial resources and brand capital. Finally, he might even help Google in the antitrust suit.
It's also possible I'm an idiot and thinking too much into yet another useless VP's attempts to distinguish himself in a marginal way. I personally think they have a winner here though; they're hugely committed to a browser-based environment and even stand to control web browsers and http altogether with Chromium's dominance and the amount of work they're dumping into the stuff it talks to. It's a fairly positive and mature future, and speaks to the kind of leadership you get from people who focus on building value rather than building technology.
PRE-EDIT: yes, I can see colors. they just clash when certain shades are exactly next to each other
It always astonishes me how lack-luster google’s design language is.
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.
1: https://www.protocol.com/javier-soltero-google-microsoft-int...
It's more like building a passive perception of belonging-together over a prolonged period of time, where this is only one step of many, resulting in a subtle shifting of the framing when the discussion happens.
And I can see it, tbh.
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.
Do they really think that people do not write emails any more?
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.
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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gabrielshaoolian/2017/02/07/log...
tldr; when your designers tell you it’s out of date with current design trends and that they can evoke a better brand response with a new design.
> 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.
- Open source - Encryption at rest when using a cloud service for syncing - Apps for all major platforms
I replaced it with a combination of Shaarli for links and Standard Notes for everything else.
My goal for the last year was to be off as many google services as possible by the end of next year, and they've been making it surprisingly easy for me. All I really had left at this point was Google Play Music and Google Keep (apart from android itself and gmail, which I'm working on). If they phase these two products out, they will have alienated me out of every product of theirs I've ever used. They're already consolidating google play with youtube music (which is bizarre to me).
The hardest to cut will probably be gmail, but the fact that they slip advertisements into my inboxes has been pretty motivating. Youtube is also difficult, but as a resource it seems to somehow become less and less useful to me every year. I know that subscribing to youtube channels via RSS and using a program to automatically download the videos doesn't count as 'not using youtube,' but these days I'm starting to feel like content creators will get there eventually wrt video hosting alternatives
Update: Published as a Greasyfork script. Only working for Drive & Meet right now.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/414827-retroogle
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.
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.
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.
This is what happened inside Yahoo as it was imploding. Every team wanted their own dev library/graphics/app style to "win" internally. It resulted in very arrogant dev & project leads fighting with each other for no customer benefit.
It's the same in Academia though. "In the heart of every Vice Chancellor lies an Architect". Gotta build a new building so you can put your name on it.
Haha, interesting analogy! (Math professor here.)
I'd say in many ways it's the same, but with one key difference. While administrators are fighting to push their visions, many faculty members tune out, do whatever work it is they want to do, and pretty much ignore what is going on overall at their institutions.
If you read Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle of Higher Education, then you can read accounts of university leaders who were brought in to push for big changes, who boldly announced a change of direction, ... and who were simply ignored and then quit.
Can't remember when was the last time Microsoft pulled off a new successful consumer ready product or significantly improved an existing one.
Xbox Game Pass is a good idea and the series X also looks like a good bet.
Buying GitHub was smart, WSL is also a very positive move for developers.
Azure is in second place behind AWS with Google a distant third.
Typescript is doing really well too.
That’s a lot of positive moves around a coherent strategy.
Stratechery goes into more detail, and I think makes a pretty compelling case.
It’s not comparable to IBM in my opinion, I think MSFT has really righted the ship - I think they’re in a strong position for the future.
The change seems happened during the time when Google was switching focus away from "been cool" to profitability. The business reason behind it was probably that Google don't want leak any hit about what they were up to, because a leak may cost a major growth opportunity that is unknown to them when they started the experiment.
Well, that's fine, next manager now has chance to improve brand recognition and impress top management.
I am only interested in disintegration.
Google has failed my trust.
(1) I'm not Jeff
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...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xX8pKlUiSkG10-zIGZeKda5A9qf...
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.
Especially if small or you’re visually impaired: https://i.ibb.co/pR7cqxN/9-FA9147-E-A493-49-A2-A394-7-D0909-...