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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.
[...] 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.
What is this horrible fascination with light grey text on white backgrounds?
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.
It started out with the horrible fascination with the "flat" style whereby it was hard to tell buttons from boxes etc. It was hard to use, but art trumped* function.
But they were not satisfied whacking shadows and shading, they had to whack colors also. At this pace, we'll go back to monochrome uni-spaced character-mode UI's. Keep your ASCII art; it may get you a promotion from a young PHB who won't realize it's from 1982. "Wow, this is so modern and stylish. Good job! And can I have a copy of that 'visi calc' software you showed me? It's totally cray!"
After all, I've seen disco come back twice in my lifetime. UI fads seem in the same category as clothing and music fads. Oh right, it's not "UI" but "UX" now. Experience this!:
Git off my flat light-grey lawn! (drought made such fashionable)
* "T" word not intended to be connected with you-know-who.
Table-ized A.I.
Because stupid hipster designers have to ruin everything. God forbid any modern app be usable, it must only be stylish.