I understand that they can’t have both the new and old looks forever because they’re not willing to maintain the older style, but modern doesn’t mean “no colors”. Here, have a look:
From left to right: archive, report, and delete email. The report button could have been red, the archive blue or green, and the trash can yellow, for example, but they opted for gray. I’m not sure why.
This, on the other hand, is so much clearer by virtue of the fact that, if you can read, you instantly know what these buttons do. Even better is that the archive button is bolded; this is usually what you want to do with emails in gmail. It indicates to the user that, with Gmail, you really don’t need to delete emails, which was originally its selling point.
If you’re going to have icons, I feel they should be immediately identifiable and, if possible, colored. If you’re somehow a new user of Gmail and you saw these icons (and all the others I didn’t take pictures of), I’m sure it’d be more confusing than helpful.
*~VAEL~* I’d like your comments on this thanks
This is actually pretty interesting, as I was just talking with my coworkers about this yesterday. I’ll repeat what I said.
I officially declare that I have no idea why they did this. I tried to find some reasoning on their blog, nothing. Just references to the change, and some blabber about “google’s new look”.
I go to www.google.com and it’s less than impressive. The center is pretty okay, staying very minimalistic and functional. The top is what bothers me, that grey bar. First off, you can’t change its color; instantly the user has no control over this change, even if the whole internet loved it. But most designers don’t care for customization anyway. (it’s extra work and not always worth it) Secondly it doesn’t match the google logo at all, which was previously matched with powerful, obviously stated navigation.
Now let’s talk about your icons.
The icons themselves are fine - the spam being changed to report and an exclamation mark is good. It’s the palor that bothers us. Absolutely, anything active should be green and inactive should be grey. Naturally, red is “negative” or “stop”. In this case it’s as if they tried to state that all this grey is inactive and interacting with it brings it solid and darker - “active”. However, the aesthetic Google has just simply doesn’t match that feel. The worst part is that their intention was to increase usability for new users - and you can see in their compose link that they tried to have various focals points in places - but even extending beyond these icons, there’s actually a lack of icons in some places.
Look along the side. What in the world was the intention of removing the carefully-chosen icons for the navigation? Images. Video. News. Shopping. These icons had no purpose? Sure, it clearly states what each link does by the word: the bag near the word “shopping”. That, however, brings me to your next image.
Archive, Spam, and Delete. They clearly say what they do, and they’re not ugly, but they’re definitely lacking some personality. The main problem with them, however, is their length and language. For someone to know for certain what those buttons do, they must know the words’ equivalents in English. Worse, the translations into other languages not only take time, but could push the UI! For example, “archive” in German is “archivieren”. German has the reputation of using quite a few letters, too. So when it comes down to it, the words start looking very unappealing from both a design and usability perspective. You can say a lot more with a lot less, via proper usage of icons, but Google is not doing it here.