Since Gmail doesn’t have the obvoious envelope anymore I often open it when I want to open Maps. My brain ist like “M for Maps”.

It’s not even more aesthetic. Just more unified in branding.

Triumph of visual design over interactive design. These days, most “designers” only care about graphics visually. The much deeper science of how people use and understand things is beyond them. Worse, they think the problem is that everybody else does not “get” visual design.

Style over substance.

I actually think these are fine. If I can quickly recognise each on my homescreen (I don’t use labels) then it’s fine, and I’ve never had a problem with any of these.

I like it because each company each has its own set of apps, and they have somewhat unified app icons.

Proton is the same, which similar icons as google but with their own unified branding.

I like it, personally.

I keep all my Google icons quarantined in one folder. Case in point:

What I keep seeing: $ $ $ $ $

Also I’m sure the designs are absolutely as humanly possible adapted to perfectly achieve their goal. Too much money, people, and time involved for this not to be the case.

And the goal was never ease of use, that doesn’t bring in any more money when you have a monopoly. Engagement & forced ads do.
(By ‘forced ads’ in this case I do not mean directly advertising a specific product, but forcing you to pause your thoughts to specifically and consciously think about Google making the name/brand ever more part of your actual life and as such its shitty behaviour gets normalised, even trusted - thats just how our brains work even when we think otherwise … and I hope we all think of Google as a curse on humanity.)

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

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.

The homogenization of these icons has been a long source of consternation for me.

They’re barely functional as icons; you can scroll right by them and miss them; which makes finding the apps in a list of apps a bit annoying sometimes. Removing each icon’s unique color scheme and replacing it with the ‘company 4 colors’ was the stupidest fucking idea ever.

Even more infuriating is how they keep renaming the applications to unexpected things every so often; so they move around; and it’s dreadfully annoying to remember if they prefixed the name of the app with a G or something else completely different, which renders strict alphabetical sorting a bit moot.

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.

Remember way back when, when you could set icons to be whatever you want?

[It could be sooo easy to solve, but noooo…

Hey show some respect! A whole team of people each racked up tens of thousands of dollars of student loan 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.

Uh, are you geometrically dyslexic?

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.