This really just feels like the author isn't a fan of change. Reminds me of how everyone has complained for about two weeks after each change of Apple's icon style, then realized the new ones are fine, and it just doesn't matter that much. In two weeks, nobody will notice these new icons either.
I disagree that the author just isn't a fan of change. The old ones are definitely more readable/distinct and in my opinion there is value in that.
Of course everyone will stop talking about it in 2 weeks, there isn't all that much to talk about. It isn't a huge deal that the icons are slightly worse for these things, it will cause no major problems or anything like that. But it not being a big deal doesn't make the author wrong about these being very similar to each other and that making them less readable at a glance.
“Just feels” is not a design measurement. Designing logos is a professional skill build with years of learning visual rules and practicing implementation. This logos are clearly designed in-house by someone without the knowledge of use of white space and contrast. Color must compliment a shape in logo design, here color fights with the shapes and is reason for eyestrain. Google is engineer centric company, in my view they never looked at design seriously, and never will. They bring iterative change to branding just for the sake of “change”. And people react, not without reason in this case.
You put this in a much better description than I could come up with but it captures all my sentiments about why I dislike this. The colors are too overwhelming and "thicc" for my tastes.
Nah, I agree with the author. When I see the Gmail logo in the Android header bar, it doesn't evoke mail like the little envelope did. It just looks like a wide, foppish, transparent "M". It's like a single entendre. Where previously it represented "mail" (semantically) and "envelope" (visually), now it simply looks like a nondescript bat-signal.
