Google has announced that Gmail will receive a redesign shortly. The logo that Google has been using for its app since the start of Gmail will soon be saying goodbye. In addition, the app is expected to receive a new design.
New corporate identity
If you take a look at the logo designs of Google apps in the Play Store, you will notice that more and more apps are using Google’s new logo branding. With such logos, Google takes the original colours of the services from the design and adds its own colours (blue, green, yellow and red). In addition, more and more logos have been stripped of the 3D layering that Google planted on the world in 2015 with its Material Design style.
Bye, Envelope!
Gmail is one of the apps that – just like Google Docs, Meet and Sheet – has a new design in the offing. Earlier this year, Google Maps and Photos were provided with a new logo. A teaser from Google reveals that Gmail will be the next app to receive the minimalist design. What is striking is that the envelope, which was central to the old logo, has disappeared.
The above teaser shows an ‘M’, which will presumably be provided with the four colours that make up the Google logo – with a white background for mobile users. No colours have been added in the logo teaser, but it would make sense for Google’s own colours to be included in the design. This means that red is still reflected in the Gmail design, but the emphasis is on the ‘unity’ of Google services.
Goodbye to Red
The design of the Gmail apps, for both the desktop and the mobile apps, is already tailored to this. In the app, we mainly find white and grey tones, comparable to other Google apps. What will change about the Gmail app after the introduction of the new logo is unknown. 9to5Google reports that such logo changes usually involve changes in the design of apps.
Google Maps, for example, said goodbye to its hamburger navigation, adding navigation buttons in the bottom row. Gmail currently consists of a combination of both, with the bottom bar mainly used to switch between Gmail and Google Meet (and Chat for G Suite users). Google Photos also said goodbye to hamburger navigation: is Gmail the next app on the schedule to lose that menu?
Focus on integrations
No one outside of Google knows anything about it to date. What is clear is that Gmail will not become the Inbox replacement – which many users had hoped for. Google itself says that its customers do not want to ‘learn to use new tools’. Instead, current Gmail features should become more intuitive and the search giant is focusing on integrations, said Javier Soltero, head of G Suite at Google.
