2020 Gmail Logo Redesign

About

2020 Gmail Logo Redesign refers to jokes mocking a new Gmail logo rolled out in October of 2020. The new logo was met with heavy criticism across social media platforms, with users complaining that the logo blends in with the rest of the new Google Workspace logos too much.

Origin

On October 6th, 2020, Google announced that it would replace the Gmail logo as part of a revamp to the Google G Suite of software,^[1] which also includes changing the name of the suite to Google Workspace. The new logo was shown off in a video uploaded the same day to the Google Workspace YouTube channel, gaining over 234,000 views in 3 weeks (shown below).

Viewers were immediately critical of the redesign in the comments section, complaining that the logo was too easy to confuse with all the others (example shown below, left and right). This became one of the leading complaints among users.

Spread

As the logo was rolled out onto devices it was met with further criticism, including photoshops and memes as well as traditional text posts pointing out the issues with the logo. On October 17th, 2020, Twitter user Xploshi posted an image comparing the old G Suite logos to the new Workspace logos, captioned, "These updated google app logos are terrible."^[2] (Shown below, left). The post gained over 123,000 likes and 11,000 retweets in 12 days. On October 25th, Twitter user killedbygoogle^[3] uploaded a What The Hell Is This meme criticizing the redesign, gaining over 1,000 likes in 4 days (shown below, right).

On October 29th, yahoo! news^[4] published an article detailing the criticism toward the new logo.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References