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Comment by atarian | Hacker News Reader

The icons look way too similar. In fact, the only way to distinguish one from another is by the glyphs. This begs the question: what purpose does the blue hexagon serve besides aesthetics?

As @bowmessage mentioned, couldn't you have a color for each family of service?

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Good feedback–and rational. I'll ask the designer to consider removing the blue hexagon and making the icons glyphs. The design predates me. There might be an equally rational explanation for why it is the way it is, and it's worth asking.

I think the hexagon is OK and immediately tells me this is a GCP diagram. It also helps in aligning things when drawing on a grid and creates a unified style.

I would however suggest to differentiate the services by color-coding the background: blue for Compute, red for Storage and DB, orange for Machine Learning etc. This will make it easier to take in the diagrams at a glance.

Here's what design told me, "In the diagrams context - the blue hexagon represents GCP product. The goal is to differentiate GCP from other products and services." My read on this is that blue hexagons makes sense in the context of a heterogenous architecture, but the blue hexagons do not provide value (as you note) if your diagram is all GCP.

I totally agree, I have a few shortcuts in my GCE dashboard, but I seem to always forget which one is which. For instance logs, DNS and storage have super similar icons.

I suspect originally when there were only a few services the glyphs were distinct enough.

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