On his personal Medium blog, Homebrew partner Hunter Walk shares perspective for tech workers who worry about what it me

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 The Workspace rebrand similarly disposes of the outdated skeuomorphic calendar icon for Google Calendar, replacing it with a more abstract square that communicates its meaning with a simple number “31,” to the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.

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.

Indeed, consumers are notorious for loving to hate rebrands. Lest we forget, last month marked the 10th anniversary of what notoriously became known as the Gap Logo Debacle, in which a chorus of social media users unleashed such vitriolic reaction to the introduction of Gap’s rather innocuous new logo — which was simply the word “Gap” set in Helvetica with a blue square appended to it — that within a week, the company turned tail and abandoned it.

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

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.”

While it’s true that upon first glance (and maybe second and third glance), they might be harder to tell apart from each other, for the next 10,000 glances, they are in fact perfectly distinguishable. It just takes a little adjustment. As designer Michael Bierut noted during the tumult around the 2015 Google logo redesign, when the company’s wordmark was changed from serif to sans serif, “Most people comment on logo launches as if they’re judging a diving competition, when they should be judging a swimming competition.” In other words, new logos are better evaluated after some time has passed, rather than right away.

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.”

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.

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be that there were a lot of full-time drivers. That’s totally over. So the question is, how can you give them benefits that are split from a cost standpoint among the various activities that this driver does in their life? I think there’s a way there.

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.

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.