The past, the future, American politics — or any politics — the crazy, upsetting, hurtful beliefs and actions of others,

We still want all icons to feel google-ish, therefore they should share a consistent visual style. However, we must not lose their primary purpose out of sight. If the style is fixed, we need to create clear distinction in the other areas of shape and colours, especially when such icons are likely to be used in close proximity!,The easiest way to see how distinct the colours of the icons are is to blur them, so that the dominant colour for each becomes visible. Unsurprisingly — apart from the Gmail icon — all icons end up being an indistinguishable rainbow soup.,But they can also make us jittery and anxious and their content can trigger distress, anger, hurt, unhelpful comparisons, unworthiness — and a raft of other unhealthy emotions. You don’t have to break up with your devices, but have an open relationship; don’t let them monopolise you.,On first glance they look relatively similar (there’s an even bolder version at the end of this article!), however let’s explore how changes in details can sum up to important improvements in usability:,leave only the Drive and Docs icons colourful. The latter are essentially the same app and the Docs icon is never used in browser tabs, therefore I felt it reasonable to have them look similar:,Let’s look closer at the new Calendar icon: It’s just a square which — apart from the number in the middle — has no visual resemblance to a calendar. To make matters worse, it’s also very distinct from the old Google Calendar logo which users are familiar with both in terms of shape and colour.,Design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We use 100s if not 1000s of apps and physical items each day. For icons to be instantly recognisable, they need to borrow familiar concepts from these, which we know unconsciously.,Let’s explore in detail where the new icons fall short of their purpose and what we could do about it. We have multiple tools at our disposal to create distinct icons for each app:,It will become clear why so many of us are struggling with the new logos if we change the frame of reference how we look at them: Those logos need to be treated as icons because that’s how we use them most of the time, eg. to quickly find the browser tab we’re looking for. Unfortunately they badly fail the fundamental requirement for good (usable) icon design:,We’re all in relationships with our devices. To be fair, our phones make pretty good buddies, they’re there for us 24/7, they do what we want and they don’t answer back. They’ve made life easier — and often more fun — too.,After spending a while trying to create usable icon designs within Google’s icon design framework, I realised it’s just too restrictive for its purpose. Icons are often used in small sizes of just 16 x 16 pt in case of the favicon in the browser. For such a small area, an icon design system needs to leave enough flexibility to create clearly recognisable icons in at least one of the categories of distinction listed above. — Let’s look at the issues in Google’s approach:,I tried to implement minimal corrections to the proportions for each app logo so they will look more distinct, while sticking to Google’s style of thick outlines with negative space in the middle:,Other people can provide real comfort in times of stress. Opening up to a friend or family member when you’re struggling is great — healthy AND courageous. So is seeing a therapist. But you also need to be able to self-soothe — to calm down or unwind or pick yourself up. Having a strategy or two of your own makes you feel stronger and less vulnerable out in the world.,It’s human to worry about other people — especially those close to us, especially our kids. (Parents never stop). But we pour way too much energy into worrying about what other people are doing. What they’ve CHOSEN to do. In essence, it’s none of our business. The old saying, “if you love them, set them free” is true. And, if you don’t love them, why are you wasting any worry time at all on them? Perhaps you need to ask why you are so invested?,I sometimes think the question of scalability is also a bit of an over exaggeration. In my 20 years of writing things in PHP, I have never had to deal with “millions of requests” per second. Not even close. The majority of us are not going to be building the next Facebook, no matter how much we like to dream about doing just that. In reality we build apps that are far more targeted. We deal with specific industries, often in specific countries and we never have to worry about dealing with more than a few hundred requests per second. For many of the projects we’re involved in, that would be large. It doesn’t mean that what we do isn’t important, it just means we don’t need to think about that sort of scale. Scaling applications to deal with millions of requests just isn’t a part of our normal day-to-day.