Google Workspace (2020)Copied

In October 2020 Google renamed G Suite as Google Workspace. Ars Technica counted it as the business suite's fourth brand in 14 years: Google Apps for Your Domain at launch in 2006, then Google Apps for Work, then G Suite in 2016. Google's update blog told administrators that they would see the new name and icons across its products over the following weeks.

Google said the new brand reflected a more connected, helpful and flexible experience, and that its icons would reflect the same. The connection was real: Ars noted that Gmail had already been merged with Chat, Meet and Docs on the web, and that Meet video calls were coming into the document editors.

Visually, Gmail, Calendar, Drive and Meet all received new icons in the four-colour motif Google had been rolling out across its ecosystem, and Ars spotted a new multicoloured rectangle apparently representing the file editors. Its verdict was pointed: the icons looked very Googley, but stripped each app of its own colour identity, making them harder to tell apart. Gmail had been red, Calendar blue, Meet teal, and Drive's three colours once stood for Docs, Sheets and Slides.

Ars offered the most plausible explanation too: the icons seem designed to be found in an app store search, where one multicoloured Google mark stands out among competitors, rather than in a phone's app drawer, where they all blur together.

TechCrunch was blunter, calling the new icons little rainbow blobs that everyone would struggle to tell apart in their tabs. The writer accepted the goal of unifying the suite but argued that colour is one of the first things people notice, even in peripheral vision, and that Gmail's red, going back a decade and more, and Calendar's long standing blue were exactly what made them easy to find. The writer predicted that the icons would not last. Whether or not that holds, the critique names the real cost: consistency for the brand, friction for the user.

That is the trade in one sentence. The system is consistent, but the icons communicate the brand at the expense of the product. For users who open five of these apps every hour, shape alone now has to do the work colour used to do.