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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
> 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.
“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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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).
