Google Arts & Culture is one of the many interesting apps the company manages. This one gives the artistically inclined a digital portal into museums, cultural practices, art, and other wondrous things from around the world. It’s a relatively minor addition to Google’s suite of apps, but it was in the news earlier this year forits new icon. However, Google has changed the icon again, albeit without providing an explanation for why.
The Arts & Culture app’s new icon rolled out in January this year, featuring the four primary colors of the main Google app — red, green, blue, and yellow. However, the ampersand design, together with the use of four colors on a white background, made the icon complicated and congested. To make matters worse, there are several other Google apps like Maps, Gmail, and Files using the same color scheme. It helps Google services look like a cohesive unit, but shapes alone don’t suffice for uniqueness.
While the Play Store listing for the Arts & Culture app shows off the multicolor icon only,9to5Googlereports that installing the latest version from the store shows us a new app icon. It retains the ampersand shape overall, but features a plain white icon devoid of all the colors we didn’t appreciate. Google has swapped the icon background from white to black to aid visibility.
Colorful app icon introduced in January(left); New app icon rolling out now(right)
The app also has an animated splash screen with the same icon, which transforms into a simple outline of the black ampersand shape against a white background. Google has also used the new icon on theArts & Culture websitebanner, so the Play Store listing should be updated shortly as well.
Outline icon seen in the app splash screen
Watching Google change this app icon is like watching the color drain from a child’s face when caught in their first lie. Unlike a child, Google does not substantiate this change with reason. We can only speculate the change might be attributed to the poor reception for the multicolor icon.
While the new icon is arguably better than the last one with multiple colors, Google still has a pretty big problem on its hands. The company seems to have threedifferent styles of colorizing app icons. Mainstream apps like Maps, Gmail, and Files use the four primary colors from the Google logo, some others like Contacts, Keep, and YouTube use one primary color with a few others thrown in as accents, and a few icons, like the new one for Arts & Culture, are straight monochrome. On one hand, such discrepancy doesn’t help consumers associate these apps with Google — but on the other, the randomness is perfectly on brand for the company.
