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Google’s look, evolved

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331–340 of 447 posts

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? That seems smart to me. How often do you use the links in that drawer? Seems better to remove all that text up top and replace with a small icon for something that is rarely used.

Ugh, you definitely do not use more multiple google services if you think that. Even today, years afterwards, I was on the phone checking my calendar and I totally lost the train of the conversation as I was hunting in that dumbass thing for the calendar. The worst part is that, yes, the top was getting stuffed, but instead of letting you choose what you wanted in your menu, they added that navigation monstrosity ins…

I just find it bizarre the number of people that do this. For me, I open a new tab, and start typing "calendar.google.com", but I don't even get past c or ca on most computers before it autocompletes.

And can't you customize that menu? Just make it work for you.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#333
post #142
post #27

Here's a bit more info on the design process: https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident...

> including building a special variant of our full-color logo that is only 305 bytes, compared to our existing logo at ~14,000 bytes. That's huge for low-bandwidth users.

It doesn't really matter, because most of the top search results you click on will probably include 1MB of ad tracking javascript anyway.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#334
post #6

I love it. Quite often logo redesign processes gets completely out of hand, but this was a significant improvement over the older version: Cleaner, more modern and beautiful in all its simplicity. Bravo!

I don't like it. It seems more juvenile in the same way comic sans gets criticized for. The loss of character on the lower case g is especially unfortunate. Non est disputandum I guess.

The smaller version of the logo looks just like comic sans to me and if I'm not directly looking at the bigger version I also see comic sans. I am really not liking it.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#335
post #9

2008 HN discussion from when the outgoing "little blue g" favicon was introduced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211518 In it, Dustin Curtis criticizes Google (rather rightly, in my hindsight-enhanced opinion) for a Marissa-Mayeresque design process of "Make 300 logo variants with pseudorandom permutations, and then pick your favorite." Looking at those permutations now ( http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZYqYi4xigk/S…

The reason they did that was so that they could build up data on the effect of each factor independently. That way, when the bigwigs get into a meeting and discuss alternative designs, they can predict "Ok, this will have $X effect on revenue but will decrease search latency by Y ms, which itself will have +$X effect on revenue." I was the first engineer on the first visual redesign that tried to change everything ab…

I'm surprised no one on the team was familiar with multivariate analysis. That's the wrong way to say it. Let me rephrase more carefully...

I'm surprised no one used more sophisticated analysis techniques to allow an experiment that changes many explanatory factors simultaneously and estimates the effects of not only each factor independently but also their interactions. It's relatively straightforward statistics and would have been taught to clever undergrads or first-year grad students who specialized in math, economics, machine learning, industrial engineering, etc.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#336
post #314

Great design, but it's funny how you can infer what a company actually is by contrast to what it's trying too hard to be. Google has a very childish logo (the doodle even emphasis that) to have the company look like a fun and happy company, whereas people fear it's going to become the next big brother. When you see it that way, it's almost an admission of guilt. No company would put so much emphasis on child imagerie…

I think you're trying a bit too hard here. Google has had this sort of branding for a long time, including pre-snowden.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#337

I only noticed this when I saw it on LinkedIn side-by-side. The Microsoft logo and the Google logo are very similar in style: http://i.imgur.com/s7kR6jJ.png The blocks in the middle are the colors from both the logos.

I found it hard to compare colors using your blocks, so I remade your image: http://i.imgur.com/auB75fj.png

The yellow is very, very similar.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#338
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've offered a salary twice the median for our city, plus benefits, paid transportation, 401k matching and 3-year enrollment to our profit sharing plan. It's not a pay issue as best as I can tell.

Twice the median for "the city" overall? Including waitresses, garbage men, bank tellers, etc? If a skilled surgeon (or someone 5+ years into their career at Goldman, etc) makes 4 times the median of your city, what does the median have to do with what they're worth? Sorry, not trying to be rude, but whenever I hear people saying they "can't find anyone", they still counter that they're offering enough...and yet they…

Twice the median total would still be $70,000 so I'm not sure what you're getting at. You don't think $70k seems like a reasonable salary for a skilled graphic designer?

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#339

ignoring all mandatory marketing gobbledygook, this change makes most sense to me in the light of google's recent involvement in the NSA scandal, and their general shift from being a search only service, to being a true conglomerate, especially spanning the futuristic fields of robotics and AI research. They don't want to be like the dystopian AI from the recent movie Ex Machina, they don't want to be seen as the omn…

Yep. It immediately reminded me of this video: https://ind.ie/the-camera-panopticon/

Right in the first minute:

> What if surveillance didn't look this scary? What if it actually looked pretty friendly? Could we still identify it as a threat?

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