Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/26/the-new-gmail-logo-an-appreciation.html
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Oh, the new logos are terrible, terrible, terrible. I agree that the Frankencreation of the original Gmail logo in its entirety was pretty awful, but the red “M” envelope itself was iconic and simple. The new M is just a candy colored horror creation.
The worst offender in the new logo lineup is Calendar. It doesn’t seem to be fully rolled out yet but you can see it in the right app sidebar of the web versions of Google stuff.
The old Calendar logo told you exactly what it was with visual simplicity and clarity. This thing… does not.
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It looks like shit as a tiny favicon. The solid red ‘M’ was much easier to distinguish in the tab bar.
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Looks fine to me. I like reusing the colors from the main logo and simplifying the overall look of the sub-logo’s. But I’m also not Google’s target market since I mostly use Duck Duck Go these days and am lucky enough to maintain my own domain and email accounts, so I rarely rely on gmail for anything.
Is that the new calendar icon you’re showing? I don’t see a problem with it, it looks mostly like every other calendar app icon. A box with the number 31 has been shorthand for calendar for ages. The old icon looks uglier to me, though it contains the same exact information (box with the number 31). In addition, it has no connectivity to the overall Google branding.
One grievance I have is that the new logo has really poor contrast. I have my favicon set so that the date is the number in the favicon, which I find I use a shocking amount. At teeny tiny size the current icon is still super readable at the barest glance. The new one is going to be more of a challenge.
Google branding in Google Calendar is not important to me, or really all that important generally (as I see it). No one is choosing Google Apps because of the calendar, they’re choosing it because it’s Google, or because it comes free with Gmail. And if you have to discriminate Google Calendar from a bunch of other calendar apps, it sounds like something has gone wrong in settling on your productivity software…
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I will counter with this, because I agree 100% and couldn’t sum it up any better: https://twitter.com/jdvogt/status/1319065447346573313/photo/1
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Ah, that makes sense. I don’t pay attention to favicons myself, but if you’ve got a use for them that’s made more difficult by the change, I can understand how that would be irksome. I just don’t care enough about this to be squeefed, although every time Microsoft changes the tool bars for Word/Excel you’ll hear me screeching in anger.
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I never even noticed that the date actually changed in the favicon before you mentioned it
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Right? Is it too much to ask to have a menu??? Or a customizable toolbar?
I feel like the tweet that @pvanb links above really captures the heart of how I feel about the issue. The old icons are a mishmosh of branding but the semiotics of them are WAY clearer. The new redraws move the link between app and icon even further apart: the calendar icon is no longer a calendar flipper, it’s a square with a number; the mail icon is no longer an envelope, it’s just an M; etc. Ask a person on the street what each thing represents and it’s going to be way more challenging. This is a little less relevant in practice, but the availability heuristic plays a real role in this sort of recognition. Even among familiar users, the new icons will slow selection for a typical user as compared to the old ones.
(On that topic I’ve never liked the Drive logo, since it doesn’t communicate anything meaningful about what Drive is.)
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I note that Google is at least held out for a few years after Apple in deciding skeuomorphic design cues area bad thing.
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I never looked that closely at what Apple was doing with skeumorphism (except to recognize that they got everyone talking about skeumorphism all of a sudden) but my sense was always that they were going for a purely affective (rather than functional) purpose with those design cues. As far as affect goes, I’m pretty indifferent to skeumorphism personally. But if it helps to communicate functionality, it should absolutely be kept, because (again) availability heuristic helps to drive recognition and decisionmaking.
Exactly. I should have inserted the word “wrongly” - i.e. “in wrongly deciding”. Recognition of function is more important to a user than recognition of brand. But it’s the other way round in a world beset by too many marketeers and brand people with not enough to do and a corporate master to serve - a corporate master which thinks branding recognition is more important than function recognition.
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Marketing vs UX – the eternal battle.
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The new logos are so much harder to separate. Functionality should always have priority over style.
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My frustration is with the Outlook and the Word icons being similar colors. Many times I will accidentally click on Word, then watch my computer slowly boot it up while I wait…so I can open Outlook instead.
There is a simple 25 step process to change these icons so I can avoid this problem. However all the other icons are also blue, so doing that isn’t going to fix it…
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I feel like this is much ado about nothing. Once we get used to the new icons, we won’t think twice about them. My eyes aren’t the best, but I feel like I can tell the difference between a rectangle and a triangle and a square with a number in it pretty easily. Also: what’s a “calendar flipper”? Or an “envelope”? Yes, I’m being facetious, but I’ve never liked any sort of skeuomorphism, and Google knows its customers are getting younger every year. And IMO, it doesn’t matter if no one knows where the M comes from, as long as they know it’s the email button.
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For anyone/everyone doubting the contrast issues on the favicon here’s what it looks like on Firefox (blown up from a screenshot b/c I don’t know how to resize here).
I think in a vacuum and considered independently, the new icons are all fantastic. In use and/or when you put them next to one another: they are utter garbage. This is a masterclass in how not to do UI.
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Sure, but there’s also a preattentive processing angle to consider. Color is distinguished before shape, so when all the icons have identical color schemes it’s going to take longer to discriminate which icon is which. It may not be a lot longer, but probably long enough to be frustrating to users (even at a level that they might not be able to articulate explicitly) and almost certainly long enough to have a measurable effect on efficiency in some contexts, like tabbed browsing.
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Really? It’s possible that I actually used the browser to retrieve mail from my Gmail account as many as 3 times ever in all those years. My interface has long been through Outlook and other e-mail packages. The logo design has exactly zero impact on me. I may be in the minority.
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Worse for me is that every now and then Microsoft completely changes the main color of the icon.
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