Google Chat may jump on the four-colored logo bandwagon, but could get convenient feature

Many of you have repeatedly expressed your distaste with Google’s new Workspace design philosophy – take every logo and dip it in tie-dye. The four primary colors look great on many things, but when it comes to iconography, it makes it difficult to distinguish at a glance what apps you’re looking at.

Despite this, Google may do just that to its popular Chat application. During this year’s Workspace Summit, the company showed off a slide during its keynote at around the seven minute mark that boldly flaunted a colorful, new Chat icon.

As you’d expect, it still looks like a chat bubble, but the layered green has been replaced by green and blue with a hint of yellow and red. In the center, a white chat bubble is formed using the negative space of the icon, and surrounding it all is a rounded white backdrop.

As far as redesigns go, I’m not opposed to this one. I just can’t shake the feeling it will confuse some folks who don’t have it on their home screen and go on a scrolling fest through their apps only to skip right past it due to its similarity to all of the other Workspace apps.

More importantly, Google revealed something called ‘Timeline’ for Chat. This seems to be a new homescreen for your chats, Spaes, and more that pulls it all together. Instead of having to hunt down what’s being discussed, you’ll now have an ‘All’ tab with unreal messages, pinned chats, DMs and Spaces, with smart chip filters for each of those things individually as well.

In addition to this wonderful upcoming feature, you’ll also be able to star chats, which I’m interested in for sure. Spaces has “taken off”, and now has over 50k users who are creating personal and collaborative well, spaces for many things.

At this time, it’s unclear when all of this will roll out, and according to Google, this is just something it’s exploring at this stage. That means it may never come to the masses – at least, not all of it in its current iteration. I still think it will most certainly will though, logo and all, but we’ll have to wait for more official announcements before saying for sure.