Indeed, consumers are notorious for loving to hate rebrands. Lest we forget, last month marked the 10th anniversary of w

But in this era of remote work, which no longer occurs in a geographic place, but in a virtual space, claiming the name “Workspace” is an appropriate banner for Google to march under as it fights an increasingly higher-stakes battle on the work-from-home front against such competitors as Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft 365 and Teams.

So Google has dodged the online pitchforks and torches. But what, then, to make of this Google Workspace redesign? The name “Workspace” is interesting in that, according to Google’s own Ngram data, the word peaked in use a decade ago, and its rate of appearance in U.S. trademarks has stayed at a generally low level.

The Gap incident was part of the kickoff to a period of logo cancel culture that sank redesigns from Tropicana and the University of California to Starbucks and Instagram, and, to a lesser extent, Google itself. So, in gearing up for the big unveil, Google softened the battlefield in September by releasing a teaser image of the new Gmail “M.”

Why Does Any Company Bother to Rebrand When Consumers Always Hate It? An Investigation. From Marriott’s Bonvoy to Slack’s ‘swastika,’ the public has made it clear: Don’t dare change a logo on themmarker.medium.com

As a company becomes more familiar to consumers, it can simplify its logo, stripping out the more literal design elements in favor of a purer symbol of the brand, like the Cheshire Cat’s body fading away to leave only its smile.

Of course, many such symbolic anachronisms, such as using an icon of a floppy disc to mean “save,” continue to persist long after their original metaphorical meanings have lost their currency. The Workspace rebrand similarly disposes of the outdated skeuomorphic calendar icon for Google Calendar, replacing it with a more abstract square that communicates its meaning with a simple number “31,” to the possible consternation of Baskin-Robbins.

Logos tend to communicate in two ways: They can say something about what a company or product is or does, and they can relate some higher-level meaning about the company or product’s brand. The former tends to be more common among logos for smaller, less well-known companies that just need to tell the public something basic about who they are. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cigar store logo is just a picture of a cigar.

Google’s Workspace logos are undergoing this evolution, becoming simpler as the need to communicate their function becomes less important. At the same time, they are expressing more about their connection to the Google brand via their color scheme. Interestingly, Google and two of its biggest remote-work rivals, Microsoft and Slack, make use of the same “Crayola Theory of color design,” as writer Derek Thompson puts it. Google, though, has done a better job of owning the palette, as evidenced by its relentless imposition of the colors across its array of brand elements. It’s not hard to imagine a young person who has never seen a floppy disc or even an envelope who, upon first encountering the Microsoft logo, might naively assume that the company is some sort of subsidiary of Google.

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-Mart bought Jet.com in 2016 that retail executives began to broadly wake up and embrace e-commerce. Marc Lore was the CEO and founder of Jet.com and an excellent e-commerce executive who had founded diapers.com and soap.com (urban legend is that he and Tony Hsieh both sold to Amazon because of Sequoia’s RIP Good Times memo from 2008). Marc Lore told everyone who would listen that Amazon was consistently running 8 to 10% FCF margins in North American retail, that no one was competing with them and that there was an opportunity to build a large, profitable competitor in America. I was a board observer for Jet.com and believe acquiring it was profoundly important for Walmart and woke up many other retailers to the importance of aggressively investing in e-commerce.

While there was certainly a fair amount of roasting over the newfound visual confusion created by the rebrand, on the whole, the backlash was short-lived and met with more ambivalence than vitriol. My initial analysis shows that in the week following the new Gap logo’s debut, there were 93 tweets containing the words “Gap,” “logo,” and “sucks,” compared to just four such tweets for Gmail over the same time period.

But as a company becomes more familiar to consumers, it can simplify its logo, stripping out the more literal design elements in favor of a purer symbol of the brand, like the Cheshire Cat’s body fading away to leave only its smile. Nike did this in the early 1990s, untethering its Swoosh from the company wordmark, and UPS shed the archaic string-tied package from its logo in 2003 in favor of the “golden comb-over.” As design critic Karrie Jacobs wrote in 1987, “Logos, then, evolve backward with complex, multifaceted trademarks down in the primordial muck and geometric marks of amoebalike plainness up at the top of the ladder.”

I once took a class with Sidney J. Levy, who was capping off a long career in advertising with a gig as the Coca-Cola Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management. He asked the class to evaluate how a print advertisement communicated to its audience. Based on the parameters of the assignment, I suggested to him that he was really asking about persuasion, not communication. He responded that all communication is persuasion, which sounded preposterous to me. If I ask you for the time and you tell me it’s 2:00, how are you trying to persuade me?

But while Google was able to simplify its Google Meet icon by ditching its speech bubble, it retained the ancient convention, used by Zoom as well, of a triangle sticking out of a rectangle to represent a matte box—a camera accessory that is certainly not a feature of many webcams these days. Similarly, the new Google Docs symbol keeps, in the form of a red triangular corner that ties all five of the new logos together, the “dog-ear” element that has for decades communicated, “Hey, this is not just a rectangle. It’s a sheet of paper!” Only the triangular Google Drive logo, the least altered of the five in this rebrand, works as a purely abstract symbol.

Even when it comes to somewhat ephemeral matters of creativity in design, the company is dedicated to a philosophy of fastidious decision-making based on rigorous testing. Google, after all, famously evaluated 41 shades of blue to see which would best prompt users to click links and revamped its logo by moving the lowercase “g” one pixel to the right and the “l” one pixel right and one pixel down. So it was not surprising to learn that the decision to jettison the Gmail envelope was informed by “regular user testing and feedback” that showed that “the logo’s long-standing envelope element wasn’t as critical to the design as [Google] had anticipated.”

As for the disappearance of the Gmail envelope, it’s probably long overdue, as the use of envelopes in logos peaked in the aughts and is on its way down, according to an analysis of U.S. trademark data. While this year’s election has focused new attention on the U.S. Postal Service’s role in the delivery of ballots, in general the use of envelopes to mail letters as a means of communication seems increasingly archaic, as does employing an envelope — or, more precisely, the back of an envelope — to represent email.