Google last month rebranded its suite of cloud computing, productivity, and collaboration tools as “Workspace,” and rolled out a logo update across its suite of products. The latter isn’t going over too well with some internet users, though.
Gmail, Google Calendar, and more now feature a four-color icon that matches Google’s four-color logo. But some find them distracting or confusing. “The new icons by Google look all the same,” digital product designer Claudio Postinghel tweeted on Tuesday. “So I made a Chrome extension to fix the problem.”
The “sometimes” coder launched the plug-in this week, enabling folks to restore the old Meet, Calendar, and Gmail icons “to make tabs more recognizable,” the product page said. Install and activate the extension to turn Google’s kaleidoscopic symbols back into the simple, two-color emblems you know and love.
Introduced in early October, Workspace is, in large part, the company’s response to a global pandemic and the shift in how people nine-to-five it. Google is advertising the product as offering “everything you need to get anything done” in one place, while also making collaboration as easy as possible.
Plus, Workspace runs on what Google claims is the “cleanest cloud in the industry”—a feel-good factor the firm hopes will outweigh the fact that the Calendar icon isn’t blue and white anymore.
“I don’t even mind the new icons that much, but it’s a usability problem,” Postinghel wrote in a Product Hunt discussion. “Maybe we can even improve it,” he continued, suggesting the use of “even more visible icons,” like a red circle for Gmail.
For now, the plug-in provides some peace of mind, and ensures you won’t accidentally open Drive to write an email. Available free for Chrome, “Restore Old Google Icons” is coming “soon” to Firefox browsers.
