Not Google related, but whoever decide that the best color scheme for an Office suite should be light grey text on a white background deserves to be flogged.
Custom icon packs for the win!
Since Gmail doesn’t have the obvoious envelope anymore I often open it when I want to open Maps. My brain ist like “M for Maps”.
Yeah this is the worst! You know a few designers raised this exact problem during review, too, and were shut down
The absolute worst is the idiotic “let’s make all app icons the same shape” thing.
Hey show some respect! A whole team of people each racked up tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt and spent months tweaking their designs, just for upper management to wreck it all on a whim in order to get you those new icons.
oh noooo icons sharing a common design language and color scheme? the absolute horror.
if you can’t tell the difference between these icons i have a great educational resource for you
nah I still recognized all of them as google products bc they use the same 4 colors, but in different interesting ways. gmail was all red but a letter shape. Maps was a red pinhead. drive was a triangle but used all the colors but red. Calendar was a less noticeable shape but instantly recognizeable as a tabletop day calendar. now everything has to use all 4 colors and the shapes are so small that the colors can’t do enough on a phone screen to differentiate themselves.
They already had a common design language and color scheme. Now they have a samey-ness to them that takes away visual interest.
Try harder, you can do better than this.
Uh, are you geometrically dyslexic?
Yeah these icons are all distinctive
Oh yeah it’s easy to confuse an envelope for a bulbous pin if they’re the same color. I nearly mailed a letter in a turkey baster the other day so I get it
Let me just write down my appointments on this cartoon old-timey video camera
I use an icon pack on Android to revert them to their previous icon, the new ones are indeed terrible…
What I keep seeing: $ $ $ $ $
Also I’m sure the designs are absolutely as humanly possible adapted to perfectly achieve their goal. Too much money, people, and time involved for this not to be the case.
And the goal was never ease of use, that doesn’t bring in any more money when you have a monopoly. Engagement & forced ads do.
(By ‘forced ads’ in this case I do not mean directly advertising a specific product, but forcing you to pause your thoughts to specifically and consciously think about Google making the name/brand ever more part of your actual life and as such its shitty behaviour gets normalised, even trusted - thats just how our brains work even when we think otherwise … and I hope we all think of Google as a curse on humanity.)I like the new version of the last two, but old for the rest
The camera app and spreadsheet app? Because that’s what i would’ve guessed they were based on the icons
those are Meet and Calendar.
There’s always a yoyo effect with design. I fully expect Google to swing back to gothic palette and highly detailed icon within the next decade.
I’ll keep using my favorite icon pack instead, thank you very much
which do you use ? i am looking for a good one
I use Flat Circle. It’s not free, though.
Poppin, Olympia, Cyber, Minima and/or Outline, depending on the mood, season and launcher. There isn’t much left on factory spec with my phone.
It’s not even more aesthetic. Just more unified in branding.
Whatever. It sucks ass is the point.
My point is that it’s also ugly.
Yeah, the old logos were all over the place. At first glance it’s not obvious they’re all Google apps.
To me, that’s just the case for camera and calendar. Maps is IMHO perfect (except the unnecessary G) and the red-and-white envelope is quite well-known.
And? All of those being part of the same walled garden is a bug in the legal system not a feature.
Better be explicit about the walled garden rather than being diffuse about it
I definitely find it more aesthetically pleasing. Just like the icon packs.
And that’s why I don’t really hate it. I hate Google, but I think it’s a neat design choice. I still hate Microsoft’s icon design a lot though, they can’t seem to stick with one thing.
And the interface of their apps are still incoherent af. I don’t know how, but they manage to make things worse every time
It’s ok, they’ll just retire the service eventually.
I think what really bothers me about the aesthetics is that the shapes are broken up by the coloration. For example, the pin icon for Google Maps looks almost like a hook, because the yellow has little contrast on this white background.
I wouldn’t even call this “aesthetics”. Rather “conceptual homogeneity” or something like that. It’s what happens when you strive for a uniform look over a useful or visually pleasing one.
In some countries uniform look at least provided good for society. In this case it provides only profits for to 1%.
Good for society:
Even uniformity can be aesthetically pleasing, but these icons are decidedly not.
