Google Video Shows All-White Redesigns For Gmail, Google Photos, and More (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: This year, Google is pushing out a major revamp to its Material Design guidelines. The new design language is slowly creeping across Google's portfolio, and so far we've seen big changes for Gmail.com, early builds of Chrome, and for Android P. The Android side of things has so far only been the base operating system, but now a new Google design video has surfaced that shows off new designs for Gmail, Google Photos, Google Trips, and Google Drive.

[...] The Gmail screens strip the app of its trademark red UI elements and give us a white bottom bar and white background. The phone inbox shows attached documents and even has large thumbnails for images. The message screen appears to show attachments on a horizontal scrolling carousel, which looks a lot like the horizontally scrolling news articles in the Google Feed. This screen again places the important controls down at the bottom of the screen, where a bottom bar houses the usual "Mark as Read," "Delete," "Archive," and "Reply All" buttons. We even get to see the compose screen for a second, which shows previous replies above your compose field.

Comments

Light-grey text on white?!

[hazem]

What is this horrible fascination with light grey text on white backgrounds?

Re:Light-grey text on white?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this horrible fascination with light grey text on white backgrounds?

Honestly, it's just yet another symptom in the down slope to even shittier interfaces designed by morons where everything in the world is a tablet, phone, or webpage.

Everything from Windows to pretty much most native apps are suffering from this. Huge chunks of whitespace around things, unused space where they just don't put content, or dumbing down interfaces for teenagers with smart phones.

It's especially frustrating to be sitting in front of a multi-monitor setup on a desktop with a screen which has been maximised, and a huge chunk of the screen is unused. Google did this with their News, going away from the ability to have 2 columns of stories, or apparently the ability to have custom sections.

I look at Google News these days in a full screen browser on a large monitor, and fully 50% of the screen is just dead space. The information density is half of what it used to be.

About 25 years ago, a friend said that the web had pushed back user interface design by 20 years. And now, apps are doing that even further.

My only conclusion is the people who design interfaces are drooling idiots, designing interfaces for drooling idiots. And with each iteration the utility of an interface if you're still on a desktop gets even worse.

Even Office has been doing this .. an increasingly flat looking interface which looks like a bad web page, not a native desktop application.

The fascination with bad backgrounds is just a further step in making lowest-common-denominator interfaces optimised for small touch screens. It's lots of marketing and style, but very little substance and utility.

Personally, I absolutely loathe modern interfaces on a desktop. Because they are no longer useful for navigating with a mouse.

Anyone surprised?

[CharlesAKAChuck]

It's some sort of plot by Google to get people to quit using their services, I think.

Google Finance - used to be really good, loads of information, very useful. Now, it's a whole lot of white space with not a lot else. No need to visit that page any more.

Google News - used to be really good, loads of information, very useful. Now, it's a whole lot of white space with not a lot else. No need to visit that page any more.

Google home page - well okay, that one should be a lot of white space and a search box, I'll give them that one.

Re:Material Design Sucks

[pete6677]

Because stupid hipster designers have to ruin everything. God forbid any modern app be usable, it must only be stylish.