Ask HN: What do you think about the new Chrome's icon? The announcement is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30220203 Google Chrome has simplified it's icon, so no more shadows and brighter colors. The blue eye inside the circle is now bigger. And personally, I hate this redesign. Not the icon, but this whole trend to simplify, update, redesign perfectly normal things. Especially, when the design team has a lot of other stuff to do. |
I agree that the simplifying of icons has become tired, but I started asking myself a question to help me not get worked up over it. If I didn't know the history of this icon and I saw it for the first time, is it memorable in a good way or a bad way? Most of the time the answer is neither. It's unfortunate though how much time is spent by designers and devs on this sort of thing. And it's not just designers, it's people hours and A/b testing and compliance and red tape.
If I was a designer, being able to say I worked on the logo of something as big as chrome would feel like achievement. But in the bigger picture, it's hard to make novel design choices in these redesigns.
I learned to not think about it as much, just like I learned to make do with different fonts because I code across a lot of different systems.
Looking at the new icon by itself though if I didn't already know it as the chrome icon, makes it look like the icon of any random new startup/project. It's bland, round, flat. Actually it does suit what Chrome has become--it doesn't stand for anything in particular, just commercial software that happens to be based on some opensource.