The old icons had very little to visually differentiate them.
Nathan Ingraham for Engadget
About five years ago, Google redesigned the icons for most of its apps and services, including widely-used tools like Drive, Meet, Calendar and so on. The internet’s response was not positive, and with good reason. Many correctly pointed out that Google removed the individual defining characteristics of its icons, replacing them with an outline made up of the company’s signature four colors. If you look closely, you’ll recognize the outline of a document for Google Docs, or a camera for Meet. But at a glance, the new icons were much harder to differentiate than the ones they replaced.
In a win for legibility, Google is changing course. It started with a more distinctive icon for Google Maps a few months ago, one that has more depth while still incorporating Google’s colors and the ubiquitous pin design. Then, a few weeks ago, 9to5Google revealed that a full-scale redesign was on its way. Now, with Google I/O just one day away, those redesigned icons are rolling out.
The first place I noticed them was in my personal Gmail account; the “app switcher” in the top right revealed new designs across the board. Those icons haven’t propagated everywhere yet; clicking into Drive or Calendar shows the old ones still. But a number of Google apps on my iPhone were also updated with new icons as well, so it seems safe to say that a full-scale launch is in progress.
I personally got used to the last generation of icons, but there’s no doubt at all that these are major improvements that make it much easier to tell apps apart at a quick glance. These icons also call to mind the redesigned 3D emoji that Google introduced last week as part of Android 17.
If you’re not seeing them yet, be patient — they’ve arrived on my phone and across multiple Google accounts, so it seems like the company is doing a full-scale push. We’ll likely hear more about this at I/O tomorrow, as well. We’ll be live-blogging the keynote at 1PM ET; join us, won’t you?
