Better not to get attached.īut sometimes they do something so senseless that it is incumbent upon anyone who cares at all to throw the company’s justification in its face and tell them they blew it The last time I cared enough was with Google Reader.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, if you wait long enough by the river, the bodies of your favorite Google products will float by.

We’ve seen so many Google icon languages over the years that it’s hard to bring oneself to care about new ones. That can be important, especially with a company like Google, which abandons apps, services, design languages, and other things like ballast out of a sinking hot air balloon (a remarkably apt comparison, in fact). Companies always talk loud and long about their design language and choices, so as an antidote I thought I’d just explain why these new ones are bad and probably won’t last.įirst I should say that I understand Google’s intent here, to unify the visual language of the various apps in its suite.

Google really whiffed with the new logos for its “reimagination” of G Suite as Google Workspace, replacing icons that are familiar, recognizable, and in Gmail’s case iconic if you will, with little rainbow blobs that everyone will now struggle to tell apart in their tabs.

Old google drive logo