Can we talk about the mushy, indistinct Google icons redesign?
Just look at this.
The previous major update to the Google apps suite removed any distinctivness and left in its wake a collection of identical 4-color blocks of barely varied shapes.
That redesign was massively panned, and with good cause. The effort to rigidly unify the design language across the entire app suite left icons that were difficult to tell apart.
This new smeary, AI-inspired design seeks to correct some of that but ends up as both a half-measure, and a whole new tier of bad design.
Consider for a moment the Gmail icon, generally regarded as among the least borked of the redesign. It calls back to the dominant red color of the original logo, but that misses the heart of the inspiration. The original logo was a piece of mail, with the distinctive M embedded. It says, "this is email, but a little different." The new logo is still just an M, which is not even the first letter of Gmail. It says, "I guess G was already taken, so here is this mushy looking M instead."
Among the worst are the new Keep icon, which barely resembles a lightbulb... if you squint. Or the Sheets logo which no longer contains a grid, but rather a lopsided X that fell over. Hardly inspiring the confidence, stability, and reliability that people expect from an app entrusted with their important data. Likewise, the slippery new Slides icon looks like what happens when you drop your carefully ordered deck.
All of the new icons look like what an LLM might output if asked to vaguely modernize the classic logos. They lack any real design clarity, instead substituting pure slop. Everything is rounded over and filled with noncommittal gradients. Worse than design by committee. This is design stripped of any human intelligence.
