I hate these icons

It's not even more aesthetic. Just more unified in branding.

i think they did need to unify the design and branding but i also agree they went too far with it. if they had only chosen 1-2 colors for each app icon that would have helped a lot.

gmail - red

drive - yellow

maps - green

meet - blue

calendar - lighter blue

problem solved

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.

The homogenization of these icons has been a long source of consternation for me.

They're barely functional as icons; you can scroll right by them and miss them; which makes finding the apps in a list of apps a bit annoying sometimes. Removing each icon's unique color scheme and replacing it with the 'company 4 colors' was the stupidest fucking idea ever.

Even more infuriating is how they keep renaming the applications to unexpected things every so often; so they move around; and it's dreadfully annoying to remember if they prefixed the name of the app with a G or something else completely different, which renders strict alphabetical sorting a bit moot.

I keep all my Google icons quarantined in one folder. Case in point:

Plus the art they started using in gdrive. The art on its own is cool but within the Google ecosystem just feels like… what is it even… why… ugh I hate it.

Triumph of visual design over interactive design. These days, most “designers” only care about graphics visually. The much deeper science of how people use and understand things is beyond them. Worse, they think the problem is that everybody else does not “get” visual design.

Style over substance.

[It could be sooo easy to solve, but noooo...

People simultaneously justifying their jobs but not willing to make significant, meaningful changes

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".

Anyone else this there's actually nothing at all wrong with the "New" row of icons? Except for the triangle one, which is terrible in its "Original" version as well, as it indicates absolutely nothing about its app (I believe it's Google Drive, right?). All the rest are clearly distinguishable, and have relevance to what the app does.

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.

What would happen if people deserted Google products in droves?

Mail:

• Vivaldi mail
• Android client: K-9 Mail
• Desktop client: Betterbird

Cloud:

• Mega [referral URL]

Maps:

• Organic Maps

Meet:

• Matrix

Calendar:

• Vivaldi calendar, syncable with a myriad of clients.

Here's an exhaustive list of Mostly excellent “free” software that I use.

Please also consider supporting the myriad of developers who offer their superior products for free, open source, without ads.

“What if I paid for all my free software?
I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/takemymoney.html

I actually think these are fine. If I can quickly recognise each on my homescreen (I don't use labels) then it's fine, and I've never had a problem with any of these.

I like it because each company each has its own set of apps, and they have somewhat unified app icons.

Proton is the same, which similar icons as google but with their own unified branding.

I like it, personally.

What I see:

💩 💩 💩 💩 💩

I filed a very irritated Radar / Feedback (Apple's terms for bug reports) with Apple when the icons for apps all turned to rounded squares. I compared them to Google's icons and challenged them on making everything harder to distinguish.

I hate contemporary GUI design. Not all of it, but probably half.

What's the font used in the heading? Is it some flavour of Helvetica?

I'll keep using my favorite icon pack instead, thank you very much

In case you want to feel old, this change happened almost 10 years ago now fellow grandpas.

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.)

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.

Remember way back when, when you could set icons to be whatever you want?

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 was yelling about how windows 11 swapped out text listingzs for copy, paste, etc from its contextual menus for stupid icons just the other day. Modern UIs are becoming so “streamlined” to the point of uselessness.

I use an icon pack on Android to revert them to their previous icon, the new ones are indeed terrible..

The absolute worst is the idiotic "let's make all app icons the same shape" thing.

I just stopped using most of them

I don't love the difficulty of extremely fast individual identification but there is something to be said for the ease of extremely fast collective identification, it makes it very easy to see which group of apps each app belongs to, which is also valuable.

Custom icon packs for the win!

I think the maps actually looks more distinctive because of the shape. The rest are worse to differentiate though.

I feel like it's easier to use the monochrome mode of the phone than these icons

I like the new version of the last two, but old for the rest

On top of that in Play store lots of times when I search for certain app it gives me like 10 more alternatives that all have slightly different logo but all use that same yellow-green-blue-red color palette that google has, so with all these copycats it's even harder to figure out whether app is from google or not

Its one of those things u never think about as a person without disabilities, cuz i can tell the difference just fine, i guess they should have consulted someone with a vision impairment when considering stuff like this.

Yeah this is the worst! You know a few designers raised this exact problem during review, too, and were shut down

Color is the first thing the eyes tend to notice, then shape, then lines and details. The new icons all look the same at the edge of my vision, I have to look at them straight on to distinguish them. Individually each one is fine but together, like what the hell?

I don't rawdog Google icons anymore anyway, I use an icon pack

God I miss the original Material Design

i see the new icons wanna intergrate googles colors ngl

One more reason to uninstall these app

Hmm M. M for mail. you know what else starts with M? fucking maps. Totally great to open email every damn time I want to know where I am because it doesn't look like a letter or a map anymore. Ditching google when I can.

Uh, are you geometrically dyslexic?

For mostly all of my app-launching things I always prefer searching for text than searching for an icon. In pixel launcher, I always use the app drawer search, but an even better solution is in something like Niagara launcher.

To be honest the maps and the meets icons look better

What do you mean, the new ones are still different shapes.

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