| As a designer, an actual likely answer: These are standard material design icons. Most likely someone needed to add a new button/feature and just picked whatever icon best fit the purpose, or someone designed a new icon that would fit the purpose of whatever feature/button was being added. With huge apps like Gmail, there's likely just so many different things happening that there's no time allocated to check every small change in a broader context, and these kinds of things slip in and pile up. Over time, more and more "small" things pile up, and eventually a redesign is necessary because the palette has been polluted with too many things and the software becomes too clunky. Another option is that no designer even gave this a look, or they saw it too late. This happens often too, designers might be busy working on a big new design and an engineer needs to just put in a button and doesn't think twice about just using one of the icons from the icon library. Incompetence can explain stuff sometimes, but just like engineering, design is also often a collection of compromises and sometimes a lot of compromises can collude together to form a bigger disaster. The call icon is a good example of this. It's constrained by a lot of things, like overall language rules of material design, and any prior interface design choices made about button styles, toggles, etc. If the designer came up with a totally new style of button, they'd also be scolded by their peers for not maintaining consistency. All of that said, I'm not making excuses, I'm providing an explanation. I think overall, with any kind of iconography based interactions, when in doubt, add a label. It just works. Icons are abstractions of language and actions, when it's no longer clear what they are abstracting, it's time to use language. It really is that simple. |