Plannin' On It

I know we’re done talking about how the Gmail redesign sucks, but this has been bothering me.

And I have to say, generally speaking, I don’t really mind the redesign. I don’t love it, but it doesn’t irritate me like it does some people. It’s just, well, this.

Seems pretty clear that the design decision was, “We’re gonna use icons to give it a simpler look.” But then they got to “Mark as read”, shrugged their shoulders, and just wrote it out. Same with “Move to inbox” and “more”. And the icons they did choose aren’t that great. Sure a trash can for delete; you can’t really screw that one up. But a box with an arrow means archive? Sure, Google, whatever you say. And a stop sign with an exclamation point is supposed to mean spam? To me that’s a warning, and I hesitate every time because I instinctively think clicking that will do something bad.

Anyway, seems like they could have stuck with the text labels and had something much easier to understand and more consistent.