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Google Is Really Good At Design
Joshua Topolsky, writing for The Outline: The stuff Google showed off on October 4 was brazenly designed and strangely, invitingly touchable. These gadgets were soft, colorful... delightful? They looked human, but like something future humans had made; people who'd gotten righteously drunk with aliens. You could imagine them in your living room, your den, your bedroom. Your teleportation chamber. A fuzzy little donut you can have a conversation with. A VR headset in stunning pink. A phone with playful pops of color and an interface that seems to presage what you want, when you want it. It's weird. It's subtle. It's... good. It's Google? It's Google.
It was only a few years ago that Google was actually something of a laughing stock when it came to design. As an aggressively engineer-led company, the Mountain View behemoth's early efforts, particularly with its mobile software and devices, focused not on beauty, elegance, or simplicity, but rather concentrated on flexibility, iteration, and scale. These are useful priorities for a utilitarian search engine, but didn't translate well to many of the company's other products. Design -- the mysterious intersection of art and communication -- was a second-class citizen at Google, subordinate to The Data. That much was clear from the top down.
Enter Matias Duarte, the design impresario who was responsible for the Sidekick's UI (a wacky, yet strangely prescient mobile-everything concept) and later, the revolutionary (though ill-fated) webOS -- the striking mobile operating system and design language that would be Palm's final, valiant attempt at reclaiming the mobile market. Duarte was hired by Google in 2013 (initially as Android's User Experience Director, though he is now VP of design at the company), and spearheaded a complete reset of the company's visual and functional instincts. But even Duarte was aware of the design challenges his new role presented. "I never thought I'd work for Google," he told Surface Magazine in August. "I had zero ambition to work for Google. Everybody knew Google was a terrible place for design." Duarte went to work on a system that would ultimately be dubbed Material Design -- a set of principles that not only began to dictate how Android should look and work as a mobile operating system, but also triggered the march toward a unified system of design that slowly but surely pulled Google's disparate network of services into something that much more closely resembled a singular vision. A school of thought. A family.
It was only a few years ago that Google was actually something of a laughing stock when it came to design. As an aggressively engineer-led company, the Mountain View behemoth's early efforts, particularly with its mobile software and devices, focused not on beauty, elegance, or simplicity, but rather concentrated on flexibility, iteration, and scale. These are useful priorities for a utilitarian search engine, but didn't translate well to many of the company's other products. Design -- the mysterious intersection of art and communication -- was a second-class citizen at Google, subordinate to The Data. That much was clear from the top down.
Enter Matias Duarte, the design impresario who was responsible for the Sidekick's UI (a wacky, yet strangely prescient mobile-everything concept) and later, the revolutionary (though ill-fated) webOS -- the striking mobile operating system and design language that would be Palm's final, valiant attempt at reclaiming the mobile market. Duarte was hired by Google in 2013 (initially as Android's User Experience Director, though he is now VP of design at the company), and spearheaded a complete reset of the company's visual and functional instincts. But even Duarte was aware of the design challenges his new role presented. "I never thought I'd work for Google," he told Surface Magazine in August. "I had zero ambition to work for Google. Everybody knew Google was a terrible place for design." Duarte went to work on a system that would ultimately be dubbed Material Design -- a set of principles that not only began to dictate how Android should look and work as a mobile operating system, but also triggered the march toward a unified system of design that slowly but surely pulled Google's disparate network of services into something that much more closely resembled a singular vision. A school of thought. A family.
Apparently you haven't used the docs.google.com interface; it's a real piece of shit, somehow they managed to do worse than Apple & Canonical.
Is Material Design the thing where I can't tell which part of the screen is a button and which part isn't?
Exactly.
And your befuddlement is not unique.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The MBA-types didn't take over Google Maps. Google hired designers from Apple to redesign it. The story was on Slashdot at the time, and everyone groaned because we all knew what was coming. Sure enough, the first update from the new designers removed tons of options. I kept the last version as long as I could, and then one fateful day decided Google Maps was a waste of space on my phone. Haven't looked back since. Don't miss it at all, either.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Google didn't create "Google Maps" either. it was developed by "Where 2 Technologies"(started by some Australians) which Google bought.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps
They also bought YouTube. Some people don't even know YouTube is Google's property. It is a separate brand like Microsoft does with XBox.
And they bought Android too, which was going to be a palm-like device with keyboard:
https://m.androidcentral.com/look-back-google-sooner-first-android-phone
That was until the iPhone was debuted and then Eric Schmidt (who was then on Apple's board) got the Android team to copy it, which lead to pressure on him to eventually to resign from Apple's board. The copying of the iPhone lead to Steve Jobs famously saying Android as it had become was a "stolen product" and declaring he would go "thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death because they know they are guilty."
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1162728/steve-jobs-vendetta-against-google-believed-android-stole-apple-iphones
And Android has now been turned into a way to distribute ads and track users for money. It's not really an OS. Its a Trojan Horse. It's an ad-distribution and "Big Brother" screen in one.
So I don't think Google had created something useful "in house" since search.
And they've always been Evil.
Guidelines for Material buttons here: https://material.io/guidelines...
As you can see, when there is any confusion about things being buttons you use a box to make it clear. If apps fail to do that and you are confused, they are doing Material design wrong.
Unfortunately, there are some poor imitations out there.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They use a left triangle for back, the same as your web browser and your VCR and your tape deck.
One of the core parts of Material design is an accent colour and/or border to highlight things you can interact with. This is similar to web browsers that colour links, although browsers are worse because you can have clickable images and the like with no indication.
High contrast is another staple of Material design.
Maybe you are mixing it up with other flat designs, like Apple's (which does use a lot of low contrast). I'm not saying Google are perfect but a lot of the complaints about Material design are addressed in the spec, the criticism should really be that Google don't always follow their own guidelines.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC