ABA-003
Logo
The sparkle that ate the interface
Gemini's four-pointed star in a blue-to-violet gradient became the house style for AI across Google, and then across everyone else.
✦
Gemini launched in December 2023 with a four-pointed sparkle in a soft gradient. By 2025 Google had pushed gradients into its own "G" as well, a quiet admission that AI is now the parent brand.
The sparkle is a problem for the whole category, not just Google. It is the symbol for "magic happens here", and when every product ships the same symbol, the magic becomes a button like any other.
The gradient does the work the shape cannot. Blue for Google trust, violet for novelty, a warm pink at the tail. It holds up at 16 pixels, which is where it lives most of the time.