The design department is getting into greatest-hits territory
For years now, Google Lens has made it super easy to look up the sort of stuff that defies description — just take a picture. More than that, it’s simplified translation, QR code scanning, and optical character recognition. Along the way, we’ve seen the service’s look shift a bit, and right now it’s picking up its latest tweak, as Lens adopts some new iconography.
The Lens icons has gone through numerous changes over the year, from variations of that rounded-off squircle colored like the Google logo, to a more recognizable camera shape with a circle in the center. And now, as the Google News Telegram group moderator @Nail_Sadykov highlights on Twitter, we’re getting a new icon that’s sort of a mash-up of those earlier designs.
The latest icon also restores the green circle in the lower-right corner, previously seen in both the 2019 logo and the original.
It looks like our new entry first showed up in Chrome Canary v114, which is also Google’s test ground for many visual updates planned as a part of the browser’s 2023 refresh. It is also present with v14.17.16 of Google Search on Android. However, we have yet to see the Lens icon change in the Pixel Launcher, Google Photos, the Lens listing on the Play Store, and Chrome new tab pages.
The new icon for Lens keeps enough familiarity that it should still be easily recognizable. Even if Google wants to keep tweaking it for the foreseeable future, that sounds fine with us.
