Gmail (Google Workspace)Copied

In October 2020 Google renamed G Suite as Google Workspace and redesigned the icons of its core apps so they read as one family. Gmail's red-and-white envelope, one of the most recognisable icons on any phone, was the most visible casualty.

Javier Soltero, Google's VP and general manager for Workspace, framed the change as a product story: apps built a decade earlier to solve separate problems had become so integrated that the lines between them were disappearing, and the icons should show one family. He told Fast Company it was the moment to stop defining Google's offerings in terms invented by somebody else in a different era. The context was the pandemic shift to remote work.

The new Gmail mark keeps the M but builds it from Google's blue, red, yellow and green. The envelope is now only implied, using the white space around the central chevron. Red still dominates, with a touch of yellow and blue and green holding up the arches. Calendar, Docs, Meet and Sheets got matching redesigns, all following the same multi-colour, simplified-shape logic used for Maps, Photos and Chrome. The Verge cited Fast Company's report that Google had considered dropping the M or the red altogether, but research participants objected; the same research showed the envelope itself was not essential.

The response was immediate and hostile. TechCrunch ran a column headlined Google's new logos are bad, arguing the icons had all the colours and therefore none, so users would struggle to tell them apart in browser tabs. Ars Technica made the same point more coolly, suggesting the icons suited an app store search better than an app drawer, and Creative Bloq collected users calling the Gmail mark a joke.

The icons were designed in-house at Google.

TechCrunch's critique was the most detailed. Gmail's red, it argued, had made the icon recognisable even in peripheral vision for over a decade; the new icons all used every colour, in inconsistent orders and directions, so at real tab size of about 20 pixels they blurred together like crumpled candy wrappers. The writer also faulted the hollow, mostly rectangular shapes, which let whatever background a user's theme provided leak through, and the lopsided visual weight as darker colours dominated on white. His guess was that the team had judged the icons at large sizes rather than on a cheap Chromebook or phone, and he predicted they would not last.

The Verge's verdict was blunt: lined up with Google's other icons, they are hard to tell apart. That is the central trade-off. As a family the system is coherent, but at the size of a phone's home screen, every icon became a small four-colour shape. Gmail survived better than most because the M and the red stayed.