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Google’s look, evolved

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Re: Google’s look, evolved

#101

Post by raldi »

davidw wrote: post #60
raldi wrote: 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 new favicon is way better IMO. On the other hand, the main logo... I think this sums it up: "seem as much like a preschool as humanly possible". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153449 I'm just not a fan of extremely flat designs.

Have you only been looking at them on a computer? On a phone, and especially on a watch, flat designs seem far superior to me.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#102

Post by dmix »

sirtastic wrote: post #35
stormen wrote: 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 agree. Material design to me seemed like a great step as well. The different looks between Google products didn't seem so bad till they started to move everything over to material design and I realized how fragmented the previous designs were. Didn't even see the problem till it was fixed. slow clap

> Didn't even see the problem till it was fixed

Most design problems are this way. Even after you fix them they are often not obvious to the user despite improving the UX.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#103

Post by Klathmon »

fluidcruft wrote: post #61
speik wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, why did you think there was a pivot away from flat design? I'm also interested in learning about some alternative designs though.

In my experience "flat design" seems to have become synonymous with hidden and undiscoverable. Metro and Material were/are horrible in this respect (I don't use iOS so I don't know how Apple's version fares in that regard). My experience is that it seems to be based on the philosophy of "just touch things to learn what they do" but then you're constantly punished with "oh, you touched something so things changed". It…

A major part of material is that nothing is hidden.

No right clicking, no long press, overflow style menus are meant to be used sparingly.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#104

Post by notatoad »

davidw wrote: post #60
raldi wrote: 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 new favicon is way better IMO. On the other hand, the main logo... I think this sums it up: "seem as much like a preschool as humanly possible". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153449 I'm just not a fan of extremely flat designs.

Today's google doodle seems to reinforce that "as much like preschool as humanly possible" is exactly what they were shooting for here.

https://www.google.ca/?doodle=22175023&hl=en&nord=1

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#105

Post by fluidcruft »

Klathmon wrote: post #103
fluidcruft wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience "flat design" seems to have become synonymous with hidden and undiscoverable. Metro and Material were/are horrible in this respect (I don't use iOS so I don't know how Apple's version fares in that regard). My experience is that it seems to be based on the philosophy of "just touch things to learn what they do" but then you're constantly punished with "oh, you touched something so things changed". It…

A major part of material is that nothing is hidden. No right clicking, no long press, overflow style menus are meant to be used sparingly.

Perhaps in theory, but not in practice. One thing about material is that you can't even see the edges of widgets. Sometimes you have to touch exactly on top of some letter because the sensitive area doesn't have any padding. Often when you think you're touching one thing, you end up touching another. Sometimes you have really tiny sensitive areas surrounded by vast wastelands of insensitive negative space with no visual separation of the two. Material also doesn't work well with pointing devices, IMHO. ModernUI seems to have evolved a little better in that aspect. I sense my Chromebook experience devolving with each update.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#107

Post by ck2 »

What I still like about google is it (mostly) still works without javascript and even without cookies.

Only groups is unreadable without javascript.

But they recently killed the old style google maps, the new one is horrid.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#108

Post by bradleyjg »

stormen wrote: 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.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#109

Post by VanillaCafe »

jonknee wrote: post #52
kyrra wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually give a reason why they changed it in the blog post. Saying that the old one was designed for desktops and the new one is meant to scale better (for things like watches and phones I'd guess). Edit: to add from their design blog[0], the new logo can be sent to a client in 305 bytes of compressed SVG (vs 14,000 bytes for the old logo). So it helps with lower bandwidth. The design post also mentions scaling…

Yes, anytime there is a logo change there is a bunch of marketing talk about why. It's all bullshit. At the end of the day it was because someone wanted to make their mark and got a chance to do it. A tweaked logo won't affect Google's outcome one iota. And it will be slightly changed in another couple of years by some new VP who wants to shake things up and get that next promotion.

> Yes, anytime there is a logo change there is a bunch of marketing talk about why. It's all bullshit.

You refute that the old logo didn't scale down to smaller screens well? Getting the logo visible across mobile devices was a major part of the redesign. If your job is logos and branding, that seems like a real problem. And branding does affect a company's outcome, certainly more than "one iota". You are acting like a terrible cynic and troll.

Re: Google’s look, evolved

#110

Post by magicalist »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #64
phasmantistes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's an uncharitable opinion of design and designers. They're highly-trained professionals too, and redesigns like this aren't done just for the heck of it -- according to the blog post, this measurably increases performance on small screens and in low-bandwidth contexts.

Being able to do everything with SVGs is admittedly nice. But if Google was worried about performance on small screens and in low-bandwidth contexts, we wouldn't have Material design, as it's animations have quite a bloated effect on performance. Particularly on devices with low power/low processing. Page loads on desktops for some Google sites are up to ten seconds now. But yes, most redesigns are done just for the…

> But if Google was worried about performance on small screens and in low-bandwidth contexts, we wouldn't have Material design, as it's animations have quite a bloated effect on performance. Particularly on devices with low power/low processing. Page loads on desktops for some Google sites are up to ten seconds now.

Poorly performing animations do not work that way.

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