Google's House of Cards

theodp writes "In 'The Design That Conquered Google,' The New Yorker's Matt Buchanan reports that 'cards' — modeled after real cards — are set to become one of the dominant ways in which Google presents certain types of information to users. The power of a card as a visual-organization metaphor according to Matias Duarte (lead designer of Android), is that 'it makes very clear the atomic unity of things; it's still flexible while creating a kind of regularity.' Hey, maybe that Bill Atkinson was really on to something with that dadgum HyperCard software of his back in the '80s!"

Comments

Words

[Hypotensive]

The main advantage of presenting something as a card is that the word "card" is different from the word "page", and people are kind of tired of hearing the word "page" now.

Re:Words

[tnk1]

Well, for those who remember actually making out notecards for school work, there was a sense that a "card" actually represented a different way of presenting data that was more concise, and the understanding that space was at a premium. You also were able to manipulate them a lot more easily than pages of paper, as they were both smaller and made of more rigid stock, so the understanding was that ordering would not always be sequentially in a fixed page order.

Whether that is what people are thinking of today when they talk about "cards", I don't know. It did make sense as a metaphor back in the days of HyperCard, though.

WebOS

[dloflin]

Also sounds like the dominant paradigm in WebOS...

Metro

[jader3rd]

The power of a card as a visual-organization metaphor according to Matias Duarte (lead designer of Android), is that 'it makes very clear the atomic unity of things; it's still flexible while creating a kind of regularity.'

So... they're Live Tiles?