Google Maps has added “a fresh color scheme, including a different look for parks and city blocks,” writes SFGate. “But it’s the changes to the app’s all-important road maps that are rankling online commentators…”
Previously, highways and freeways were depicted in bright yellow, which stood out against a stark white grid. Now, the app shows every road in various shades of gray, with major thoroughfares like Interstate 80 and Highway 1 showing up darker and thicker than other roadways. Raynell Cooper, an employee at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, called the new look “cartographically disappointing” in a Monday post to X, formerly known as Twitter. He added, “major local roads and limited-access highways (freeways) are basically indistinguishable.”
TechRadar has a side-by-side comparison of the old and new color schemes, quoting one Reddit who says the new one is a bit harder to read quickly. “The toned down look is cute but not practical.”
And the Evening Standard shares more negative reactions, including one user who complained the new color scheme is “shockingly bad.”
“Hate it hate it hate it hate it. Yellow roads were so good, and everything was bright and cheery,” states another person on Reddit. “Now it’s depressing and the roads are hard to see when not fairly zoomed in, they just don’t pop like the yellow did.
One Reddit user offered another complaint. “I think the water is a fairly significant change, it’s a much closer shade to the green of the land which makes it a little harder to differentiate at a quick glance.”
And another criticism came from a post on X. “15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps…” wrote designer Elizabeth Laraki. “Last week, the team dramatically changed the map’s visual design. I don’t love it.”
It feels colder, less accurate and less human. But more importantly, they missed a key opportunity to simplify and scale… Google Maps should have cleaned up the crud overlaying the map. So much stuff has accumulated on top of the map. Currently there are ~11 different elements obscuring it.
Tech blogger John Gruber writes, “This is a very long way of saying that Google Maps’s app design should be like Apple Maps.”
