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Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

Well, perhaps we are conflating two facts inaccurately..

The TechCrunch article says "First I should say that I understand Google’s intent here, to unify the visual language of the various apps in its suite."

The need for redesign is justified, it might as well have been kickstarted by the new person on the big seat who probably due to his fresh perspective could put this in motion; but the execution and the end result did not turn out great.

However "useless" VPs are in general (debatable in this case - Javier Soltero has a great track record), this exercise would have been easily seen as a great step forward if the results were good and received great press.

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> The need for redesign is justified,

“Understanding intent” is a far cry from justified.

I understand the intent for airlines to be profitable. It does not mean that I would find putting all of the passengers in coffins for easier transport to be justified.

The justification is spelled out literally few words down the line - to unify the visual language.

If that is not clear, here is an example of Microsoft Office's excellent execution: https://medium.com/microsoft-design/redesigning-the-office-a...

I'm not sure about the 'excellent' part of the execution. The previous icons gave you more of an idea of what you were clicking on. The Word icon showed a W and a sheet of papers with lines on it. Now, it's just a W on a striped background. Excel is an X. You have know before hand the name of every MS tool to figure out what the icons stand for. Which is OK for workers experienced with the Office tool suite, but for others, W and X are no clearer than Y or T.

So, if the idea behind icons is to quickly locate the tools you need, even if you are not super-familiar with the tools, I think the previous icons served that purpose much better.

To each their own but I found their new redesign to be excellent and as someone who uses a fair number of their products, I've never had any issues differentiating one from another based on their icons.

For starters, each product has a distinct icon color, which in and of itself makes a huge difference in usability and the ability to quickly determine which icon to click. This is something the Google redesign fails completely on.

Secondly, every element behind the single-letter in each MS icon has distinctive elements that are related to the product. Excel actually has grid-cells to mimic worksheets in a minimalist fashion. Powerpoint has the pie-chart. One-Note has the fantastic minimalist binder with tabs in the background.

Between the unique color and graphical elements associated with each product, there is plenty that helps a user easily distinguish one from the other while they all still have a cohesive aesthetic.

I find it to be an outstanding redesign. In comparison, the Google redesign basically has almost none of the benefits above and makes it a lot harder to distinguish icons at a glance.

Those are some of the most confusing icons I've ever seen. WTF is Y with a few arcs?

Even if I had memorized what every icon means, I can't tell them apart without looking closely because most have the same shape and similar colors. "Everything looks the same" is not good design.

Goofy part of English language. Just because they provide their justification does not make it “justified” (other than in their eyes of course).

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