I always figured it’s “Delta” = “D” for Drive.
No idea if that’s the intent, though, or just how I see it.
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The M of the redesign doesn’t convey that it’s part of Google. I reworked it so this is much clearer.
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Oh, that’s exactly what it is. They may have even mentioned that when they rolled out that logo. But the problem is that the logo per se (and the concept of “delta / d” that is embodies) has no intrinsic semiotic relationship to the concept of the application that it stands for. Envelope = mail; calendar page = calendar, chat bubble/camera = video/text chat – all these draw some kind of actual symbolic relationship between reference and referent. But “delta = place to store files” does not – it takes two or three mental turns to get from one to the other: “Delta = d; d stands for drive; drive is a device that stores files; this application stores files.” It’s a semiotic trainwreck.
I see what you’re saying; however, “Delta” for Drive doesn’t bother me. In the same way, the [old red-and-white] Mail logo doesn’t so much say “envelope” to me as it says “M” for “Mail”. 
I’m going to miss the red “M”. I liked it.
And then one fine day, after a decade of antitrust lawsuits and selling off pieces of the business one by one, GM acquires Google.
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It’s interesting that the designers’ viewpoint seems to be of viewing a logo in a very different way from the users.
- the OP describes having to “stare at it for 15 long years every time we opened our Gmail”
- the rollout video spends more time showing each separate logo in isolation (enlarged, on a white background) than together; and when they are together, in a composed set against another white background. Never actually in use in a situation where they need to contrast with each other (e.g. in a taskbar or as favicons)
- Paul Zana’s video again shows them mainly in two contexts: enlarged for comparison with the old logo, and in a brand architecture diagram where the similarity of the logos makes sense.
Users (e.g. me, and most of the commenters here) are much more reacting to the way the logos work when used in multiple-logo environments - e.g. browser favicons, os taskbars - and are rightly pointing out that the distinguishing features (colour, shape, angularity, contrasts) have been smoothed out, so it really is more difficult to quickly tell one from another!
Zana asks, rhetorically I think, “Why are people so outraged online?”; but the way he doesn’t consider the use of these logos in practice - in software - at all, really seems to handicap his ability to answer that question.
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Fastmail is better. $25/year and your mail is private. Worth every penny.
and i guess the hope is that most people in world are okay with and understand an “m” shape for “mail” - maybe justified with the idea that nobody in the world knows the tall “o” thing is a document.
Users will definitely get it, but (once again) it’s about availability and mental distance. The cognitive distance between “M-looking thing” and “mail” is greater than between “envelope” and “mail”. This is icon design 101 stuff – the more readily an icon summons its referent, the more effective it is at serving its purpose.
The icon design anti-example I always think about is this one from the Lemmings video game:
It might take you a while to put together that “footprints” = “paws” = “pause”.
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i just meant that not all users of gmail are english speakers.
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Ah yes, good point, and one that I’d overlooked in my Anglo-centrism. (Which the Lemmings example also fails even worse!)
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The propeller hats hadn’t thought that far ahead.
One of the problems with skeuomorphism (and part of why it’s going out of fashion) is that it’s extremely culturally specific. A notepad, trash can, or envelope is “obvious” to Western white people, but nonsensical to someone from a village in India for whom a mobile phone is their first exposure to the internet and computing. There are billions of people for whom the old desktop metaphor elements are meaningless. Those people need to be reached now.
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The Adobe Creative suite has a similar problem - my two main apps, Photoshop and Lightroom, are both murky blue on dark blue. Yep, I keep hitting Lightroom by accident and watch as Adobe’s masterful coding of the startup once again brings a 32GB machine to its knees.
Perhaps everyone is using the same branding geniuses who gave us Apple TV (the box), Apple TV (the application) and Apple TV+ (the desolate streaming wasteland)?
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I think you’ve raised a very interesting problem with the weight that skeuomorphism has in front end visual design on digital devices and cultural accessibility.
My way of seeing skeumorphism, maybe naively, is as a visual version of the linguistic device of onomatopoeia.
If one takes logo design as being culturally specific and even not relevant in ‘other’ cultures then the value of skeumorphism in icon design on phones seems important.
For example, when using music software I find it very helpful to see (upon repetition) a sound shaping tool looking like the real thing and not just text. A music producer from Studio One in Jamaica from the 60’s would probably transition to Avid or Logic pro X quite comfortably… Ableton Live, not so much.
I thought it was a stylized Möbius strip or Penrose triangle, implying that your files are lost in the 4th dimension. /s
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Actually that explains a lot…
That metaphor is more apt than you know, because onomatopoeias are also extremely culturally specific. 
Look at how different cultures write and pronounce “meow” for cats or “bang” for explosions, etc. You would not be remiss in thinking that we all hear the same sounds and have the same vocal chords, so stands to reason we would all create words that are basically the same to mimic those sounds. Yet onomatopoeias vary wildly in every language and region. Such is the power of culture.
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Yep, this goes well beyond the complicated into the truly complex!
Thinking about the way that music has become codified and ‘written’ within scores makes me wander about the phenomenological assumptions of time being represented left to right and pitch being represented as down to up, low to high.
Kinda the basic building blocks of human perception, like light to dark is considered a universal experience except when we accept other critters have other ways of seeing.
Have had a lot of interest in non written music - oral/physical ways of passing along sound and voice in time. Guess this is a whole other thread to comment around 
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I don’t understand what this video had to do with anything. Literally the only point it made was that the google docs logo didn’t change (except maybe it did? It made one point and made it in a confusing way, honestly)
