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.
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
In case you want to feel old, this change happened almost 10 years ago now fellow grandpas.
Bro what
Damn, my 30s flew by if 2020 was 10 years ago
I confused it with their other branding changes from 2015, who cares I don’t use google anymore lol
Ok so for me it’s the 2012 maps logo, the 2013 gmail and the 2015 calendar logo.
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.
Even uniformity can be aesthetically pleasing, but these icons are decidedly not.
In some countries uniform look at least provided good for society. In this case it provides only profits for to 1%.
Good for society:
Custom icon packs for the win!
I use an icon pack on Android to revert them to their previous icon, the new ones are indeed terrible…
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.
People simultaneously justifying their jobs but not willing to make significant, meaningful changes
Hey show some respect! A whole team of people each racked up tens of thousands of dollars of student loanb 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.
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.
It’s not even more aesthetic. Just more unified in branding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I definitely find it more aesthetically pleasing. Just like the icon packs.
Remember way back when, when you could set icons to be whatever you want?
oh yeah, everything is a pirate ship!
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
Problem solved! If we ignore the world’s ~300 million colorblind people.
then what is your solution? do you expect them to redo their entire corporate branding palette?
Nope. The icons are honestly good enough as they are, but the original post was being disingenuous in suggesting they’re no more distinguishable than squares.
Running with that logic, having each square a different color does not solve the problem for those of us who can’t easily distinguish those colors.
Most software pretty much doesn’t give a fuck about the visually impaired despite everyone talking big shit about accessibility. So I could certainly give a fuck what color someone’s logo is.
Beat me to it.
is that the one that says “fuck the color blind” because if so hey!! that’s not nice
No way dude, it’s the other one that says, “we love the color blind.” Really.
Hey, color blind people deserve sex, too!
The icoms would still have different shapes, right?
No, it would just be the 🤣 emoji in different colors.
Yes, but the original post is suggesting that they’re ambiguous enough to all be squares. Running with that concept, making a bunch of squares different colors doesn’t fix the issue for those of us who can’t easily identify those colors.
i think they forgot to mention: they’re not all the same shape.
True. Colorblind people come in all shapes and sizes.
Ah, the old Lemmy shapearoo
Worked for a few jumps but then it sent me to kbin with a 50x error 🤷
Edited my comment with a different link, should be a bit longer now
Hold my shape, I’m going in!
oh no not again
Except that the original post was contesting that those shapes are indistinguishable from each other. My point, therefore, is that the solution offered in the post I replied to would still be indistinguishable to 300 million people.
the squares are there for comedic effect. the shapes are not actually indistinguishable. but at a glance, color is a much faster tool we use to identify these icons. so the problem here is that it takes longer for us to decipher a Google app icon, and the solution would be to differentiate the colors.
also this would help colorblind people as well, because removing unnecessarily complicated colors would make the shapes easier to identify as well.
Yes I understand the meme and I’m not trying to get into an argument. I’m just trying to educate as to why relying on color as the primary differentiator is not a solution to the problem as proposed.
at a glance, color is a much faster tool we use to identify these icons
Think about what you’re saying here, and consider how ridiculous it would sound if you said that to someone who was completely blind.
Sure, to a “color normal” person, something’s color is a great differentiator, but even when using a colorblind friendly pallette it’s just far easier for us to distinguish different shapes than colors. We’ve spent our whole lives adapting to a lack of color information so asking us to be able to work purely on color alone is like asking a blind person to see.
Again, and this part is really important and oft overlooked - this applies even when a designer has gone out of their way to choose a colorblind friendly pallette. It’s just not that easy for us. I honestly couldn’t even tell you what Google’s corporate pallette is without looking and I’m sure that information is second nature to normies.
this image has two groups:
at first glance did you separate it into red v blue or circles vs squares?
you’re absolutely making things up. we’ve evolved to differentiate shades as well, which supercedes colors. even for colorblind people this kind of image should be differentiated by color or shade first.
not to mention not all people have perfect vision, in fact people with blurry vision probably outnumber colorblind people, and that would make the shapes not extremely reliable, especially when most icons would be more or less squares and circles with small details changed.
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.
Except this is not “browsers” group or “email clients” group, this is “vertical monopoly” group.
[It could be sooo easy to solve, but noooo…
Without the distracting colors, now I can see this says MAPOD
