What you need to know
- Google says it'll be redesigning Gmail's iconic logo soon. The company has not done so since 2004 other than to flatten the icon and theme it with material trappings.
- The company shared a monochromatic image of what the new icon would look like.
- Google has not offered a timeline for this change, but it's wise to expect it in the next weeks to months.
Google is set to redesign Gmail's icon, the company teased to 9to5Google. The company had retained the same general icon since the launch of the service back in 2004, but it will now be changing it to strip away the envelope and replace it with a glyph of the "M" that formed part of that old icon.
The image shared to 9to5Google was a monochrome one, but Google has long since been redesigning old app icons to incorporate the four colors of the Google logo. There are exceptions, of course, the Play-branded apps and the YouTube-branded apps retain their own unique iconography, but by and large, the company has been moving towards this new system. Are we to expect the new Google logo colors on the new Gmail icon? It's not beyond the pale.
9to5Google speculates that Gmail may also gain some new features beyond the icon change. While Google recently expanded Gmail's feature-set on the web and mobile to position it as a Slack rival, there's always room for improvement. With the Google Photos icon redesign, Google also launched some new features and shuffled things around. Gmail may be set for a similar slight redesign.
There's no timeline for when to expect the new changes, but it's likely to be within the next few months.
