[PaulHoule]

They look different to Chinese people and they look more different to me than the syllables sound in speech but I've been looking at them for a while.

On the other hand, the Material Design icons are supposed to be used in mass market products that people can use right away and I can say they still look the same to me despite looking at Android on and off for more than a decade. (Chinese kids learn thousands of characters in 10 years of school!)

I agree with the author that the interface for Google Drive, Google Docs and other facets of their monolith (they're really the same system and shouldn't be presenting under different names at all) is atrocious. Google knows that I am logged in when I visit the "Google Drive" page and presumably knows everything about me [2], such as the fact that I frickin' use it for work and have no reason to ever click on "Try Google Drive For Work" -- ever!

Then there are all the twisty little things to click on the left hand side that all look the same like "shared folders", "shared with you", ... The one thing that's constant is it is always hard to find what I'm looking for whatever I am looking for whenever I am looking for it.

I've been laughing at the fanboys (or shills?) who want to get their bathroom done in Material Design or want to get a Material Design tatoo or have an Itasha [1] in Material Design. Gets me voted down a lot but go ahead, I've got the karma to lose.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itasha

[2] like that time I clicked on a YouTube short where a Chinese girl transforms into a fox on American TV and now it wants to show me hundreds of AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into everything

[bitpush]

We're talking about Google app logos and not material design icons.

[PaulHoule]

I think I meant the same thing as you, see

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110417985807049704

Notably the Google app icons commit the same sin that many multi-colored designs make in that they don't prefer any part of the color wheel over other parts in a particular symbol which makes all the symbols look effectively grey. I think of Scott McCloud's critique of the use of color in Stan Lee-era Marvel Comics and how actually the mid-2000s black and white reprints of those comics were great and affordable and showed that the color didn't contribute much.

In the case of the Google icons though they look terrible in monochrome too because the use of color might fool you into thinking there is contrast between visual elements in the icons except... look at it in monochrome and you see there isn't much.