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.
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.
Hey show some respect! A whole team of people each racked up tens of thousands of dollars of student loanb 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.
Please also consider supporting the myriad of developers who offer their superior products for free, open source, without ads.
“What if I paid for all my free software?
I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?” —https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/takemymoney.html
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.
I filed a very irritated Radar / Feedback (Apple's terms for bug reports) with Apple when the icons for apps all turned to rounded squares. I compared them to Google's icons and challenged them on making everything harder to distinguish.
I hate contemporary GUI design. Not all of it, but probably half.
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.
I was yelling about how windows 11 swapped out text listingzs for copy, paste, etc from its contextual menus for stupid icons just the other day. Modern UIs are becoming so “streamlined” to the point of uselessness.
Plus the art they started using in gdrive. The art on its own is cool but within the Google ecosystem just feels like… what is it even… why… ugh I hate it.
Not Google related, but whoever decide that the best color scheme for an Office suite should be light grey text on a white background deserves to be flogged.
i think they did need to unify the design and branding but i also agree they went too far with it. if they had only chosen 1-2 colors for each app icon that would have helped a lot.
For mostly all of my app-launching things I always prefer searching for text than searching for an icon. In pixel launcher, I always use the app drawer search, but an even better solution is in something like Niagara launcher.
Its one of those things u never think about as a person without disabilities, cuz i can tell the difference just fine, i guess they should have consulted someone with a vision impairment when considering stuff like this.