What do the purple icons mean on Google Maps?

In 2017, Google Maps introduced a color palette for its location icons to let users know at a glance where to find food, gas, or things to do. But Google Maps periodically adds new features, including updated color schemes, which may cause you to see red when you look at some of these icons. As for the purple icons, they mark attractions ranging from cinemas, museums and amusement parks to monuments, historic sites and photo ops.

Major attractions like the Statue of Liberty have their own special pictographs, but otherwise you’ll find the 9/11 Memorial and Museum and the Holland Tunnel ventilation shafts marked with purple pins. Pink icons represent hotels, orange pins denote places to eat and drink, while green icons generally represent natural attractions like parks, mountains, forests and beaches. Government facilities, places of religion and private residential complexes are marked with gray pins, with red icons indicating health and emergency services such as hospitals, pharmacies and fire stations.

You might argue with how Google Maps has categorized points of interest, but the biggest issue we need to resolve here is how the designers used the color blue. A cornflower blue tint is used on Pins for what Google calls “services”: banks and ATMs, gas stations and rental car lots. The parking lots feature a lighter shade of this cornflower blue. We then come to icons in a truer blue hue, if you will, that indicate a wide range of retailers, from supermarkets and big-box chains to car dealerships and carpet sellers.

And while airport terminals feature dark gray pins with an airplane pictogram, the airport itself has yet another shade of darker blue icon. In a larger map view context or with aerial Street View exploration, these icon colors may not matter as much. But there are cases, like navigating with a satellite overlay, where having similar shades of blue representing a wide variety of locations doesn’t provide a user-friendly experience. It’s hard enough to describe these colors, let alone spot their differences if we quickly use our Android Auto head unit at a red light, let alone be colorblind.