The announcement is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30220203<p>Google Chrome has simplified it's icon, so no more shadows and brighter colors. The blue eye inside the circle is now bigger. And personally, I hate this redesign. Not the icon, but this whole trend to simplify, update, redesign perfectly normal things. Especially, when the design team has a lot of other stuff to do.
I will forget it was changed in less than 7 days. The change is not intrusive.<p>I agree that the simplifying of icons has become tired, but I started asking myself a question to help me not get worked up over it. If I didn't know the history of this icon and I saw it for the first time, is it memorable in a good way or a bad way? Most of the time the answer is neither. It's unfortunate though how much time is spent by designers and devs on this sort of thing. And it's not just designers, it's people hours and A/b testing and compliance and red tape.<p>If I was a designer, being able to say I worked on the logo of something as big as chrome would feel like achievement. But in the bigger picture, it's hard to make novel design choices in these redesigns.<p>I learned to not think about it as much, just like I learned to make do with different fonts because I code across a lot of different systems.
On the one hand, I absolutely don't care either way. It's just an icon and easily still looks familiar like the chrome icon.<p>Looking at the new icon by itself though if I didn't already know it as the chrome icon, makes it look like the icon of any random new startup/project. It's bland, round, flat. Actually it does suit what Chrome has become--it doesn't stand for anything in particular, just commercial software that happens to be based on some opensource.
The comment in the tweet thread about the unpleasant color vibration between red and green, and adding a gradient to make it more "accessible" made me think of Peter from Bash in Don't Look Up commenting on how he finds the rooster to be threatening.
Swapping the blue circle for black would give them the alignment they seek. Filling the full circle so there is no gap between would be a nice step as well.