If you’re also one of those people desperate for some kind of good news today to counteract the hours of absolute horseshit you sat through last night, here’s a small win: you can officially get your old Google icons back. This nifty Chrome extension, developed by product designer Claudio Postinghel, was built to revert the Google’s icons back to their older designs — and honestly, thank god for that.
Google’s new logos for Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Meet were introduced last month as part of the official Google Workspace rollout, and were almost universally panned for both being extremely generic and almost impossible to tell apart, especially when smooshed at the top of a tiny browser tab.
I have to assume this is Google’s attempt to solidify their “brand identity” by turning some of their most iconic and visually distinct products that look like some very colourful — and very Googley — rainbow blobs. But Google’s facelift made a lot of our lives ever so slightly worse. Some people lost track of their tabs, closed tabs that they actually needed, or found themselves opening one Google product when they meant to open another — at least if the comments from people who downloaded Postinghel’s extension to revert these hated icons are to be believed. At the very least, I know that I’ve struggled with all of those problems over the past few weeks.
Postinghel’s extension — fittingly called “Restore old Google icons” — is available to add to Chrome here, and is (according to his website) coming to Firefox in the near future.