Google’s look, evolved
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
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/SEnK37orPGI/AAAAAAAAAp...) it's obvious (again, with the benefit of hindsight) that they were all very inside-the-box. Apparently nobody even considered trying a different font.
This pg comment from that thread turned out to be particularly insightful, given today's news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211649
I know it's weird, but favicons are weird.
Anyways I tried it in IE, including restarting it and it still showed the old lowercase g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153449
I'm just not a fan of extremely flat designs.
https://www.google.com/favicon.ico?newlogo
(I'm seeing a four-colors capitalize G.)
Thank you for linking it, hadn't reached my interwebs yet.
This is not only applies to caching by ISP, but also includes caching by the website itself as well (some websites put proxy in front of their server to cache rarely changed portion of the site, or even using CDN.).
First column, fourth row down: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZYqYi4xigk/SEnK37orPGI/AAAAAAAAAp...
Honestly, the block letter G on the far right, next to the lollipop, is the icon with the most character.
Actually fits their rebranding, too, but I don't think anyone at Google pays much attention.
Everyone's been seeing a lot of rainbows lately, too.
I was the first engineer on the first visual redesign that tried to change everything about the page [1]. One of our biggest problems was that since we tried to change everything at once, the metrics went haywire, and we couldn't know if a change was because we introduced a left-nav (okay, actually we kinda could, because we'd experimented with a left-nav on its own beforehand) or because we changed the line spacing or because we cleaned up the logo or because we added icons. There was effectively no way of "debugging" the user; when user behavior varied from expected, we didn't know why.
I've got plenty of other stories from that era, but they aren't really fit for a public forum. Happy to discuss privately. (Kinda ironic when the non-Googler says that to the Googler...)
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-...
Further, more and more of this seems to have been "backported" into traditional desktop presentation design.
While I will experiment around until I more or less "get it" (although I may miss finding some useful features for months), it particularly frustrates people like my parents. Mom is somewhat spatially challenged (although plenty bright in other ways), and I've had numerous calls with her where the controls for what she wants to accomplish have changed and simply bewilder her. AND, given her spatial orientation problems, sometimes we will have to have the same conversation several times -- because the rather arbitrary-appearing icons and patterns don't immediately "sink in".
P.S. I mean this as a legitimate question, if it fits the parent's -- or others' -- field of experience. It seems that a lot of this design is expected to simply permeate and be picked up by osmosis. Is that really the case?
That's driven by screen size - there's simply not enough screen real estate on a phone to label every button with words. It does have a legit discoverability problem, which most folks in UX acknowledge but don't know how to fix, given other constraints of the media. I've seen a bunch of mobile apps with help overlays or tour videos the first time you run them, which can help a lot. It gets back-ported to desktop apps because once people do learn the functionality, it leads to a cleaner, less cluttered UI.
I'll also point out that early PCs had the same problem. A typical PC from the early 1980s had 320x200 resolution, a little less than a smartwatch does today. For most of the 80s and early 90s, the standard was VGA (640x480), slightly smaller than most smartphones today. Icons were really common back then as well, they weren't all that discoverable, but at least people read manuals occasionally. Most folks don't bother now. Menus were another response to that problem, but they don't really work on mobile because the tap target is too small to efficiently hit it (the navigation drawer & hamburger menu is the modern-day equivalent of the menu).
The web - with its inherent discoverability and all of its space for explanatory text - didn't really become popular until 1280x1024 displays became widespread. I remember designing webapps for 800x600 screens; it was painful, and they had discoverability problems too.
A particular instance I recall was changes to the Calendar web page presentation. Mom initially struggled a fair amount with the controls in the left bar for selecting which calendars were displayed. This was in a Google Apps environment with 20-ish people participating.
I remember when screen presentations could be somewhat cryptic -- per your description as well as other instances. But, as you point out, there was usually a manual. Now? Often it seems to be down to guessing and poking around. Or asking friends. But if you are a bit older and not constantly talking over such things with your friends, that means of edification is somewhat starved.
P.S. Thanks for the response. And as I said, I'm curious about the perspective of someone on "the other side". I'm not trying to be unduly critical, here; just, this is an issue I've consistently bumped up against, from my own perspective.
Some of the most effective solutions to this I've seen require solutions beyond visual representation. They address the problem through dimensions independent of viewport size and space.
For example, LukeW's "Don't Divert the Train" http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1798 moves content from behind navigation and into the user's already-occurring action stream. The button is removed entirely, as is the designer's need to consider how communicative icons are for representing actions.
This requires a broader view of how features relate to each other through a design process that discovers other paths to successful behavior. Approaches like the hamburger menu, in addition to the usability issues you note, solve functional goals but have fallen out of vogue for their ineffectiveness at encouraging specific actions. Label-less icons, while attractive and convenient, suffer similar problems. As getting users successful quickly is generally an important goal (before they've internalized your app's unique visual language), the current trend of putting core functionality behind opaque symbols seems counterproductive.
Some text is active, other is not. I don't see any visual cues that distinguish the two. I end up just poking at text, or thinking, "If I were designing this, I'd want more detail or a link to further controls." In the latter case, sometimes I find I was thinking the way the designer/programmer was, and that text does indeed lead somewhere.
For someone who doesn't "think that way", this is more of a challenge.
This also seems to have become more prevalent in desktop / full screen design. Stuff that doesn't look "clicky" is.
I think that was one of my mother's problems with changes to the Google Calendar web page UI.
I worked at a major tech company where every decision needed to be justified by AB testing. Our design was a series of haphazard guesses made on data that depended on a very brittle data pipeline. Needless to say, nobody thought it was a very good product, but the incredible bureaucracy and people behind the approach made it hard to fight against.
And most A/B testing focuses on the very short time effects of the change (and change all by itself, even change for the worse can have a short term positive effect just because something is new). On another note: A/B testing has another limitation, which is that you're optimizing for the bulk, please one person more and you more or less automatically annoy another.
There's a limit to how parallelizable those problems are. At some point, more people working on an algorithm doesn't make it faster or better, it just makes it more confusing and worse. Mythical Man Month applies as much to Google as it did to IBM. And so you might as well put people onto optimizing the rest of the page as well, because they'll do more good there than having yet another cook in the ranking algorithm kitchen. (I'd argue that there are too many people working at Google in general...I left, so I'm no longer contributing to that problem. But then, there were probably too many people when I joined, so I contributed to it for 5 years.)
I'm surprised no one used more sophisticated analysis techniques to allow an experiment that changes many explanatory factors simultaneously and estimates the effects of not only each factor independently but also their interactions. It's relatively straightforward statistics and would have been taught to clever undergrads or first-year grad students who specialized in math, economics, machine learning, industrial engineering, etc.
The biggest problem is that many of the folks involved had encountered very surprising and counter-intuitive interactions between features, and because of that, they didn't trust the textbook models. For example, at one point we had a very convenient embedded-Python experimentation framework that let us rapidly try things out. Our main data-scientist on the project decreed that we were not to use it, because a number of the externalities that framework introduced - higher latency, and potential error conditions - could confound the metrics in ways that were not well-understood at the time. Data is useless unless you can trust that it actually represents reality.
Stats textbooks all make certain assumptions about reality when they present the models, and if reality doesn't conform to the assumptions, the models won't conform to reality. Certain factors were well-studied enough that we could build useful models from them - that was the point of all the experimentation around color, after all. (I wonder if those conclusions still hold, anyway: data has an expiration date, and I recall personally running an experiment that directly contradicted an experiment Marissa Mayer had run 6-8 years previously.) But that requires a lot of hypothesis testing and verification: it's never a matter of "well, the model says so, therefore it must be", but rather "well, the model says so, let's run an experiment to see if the model's predictions line up with reality, and if they do, we have a pretty strong - but not ironclad - indication that we can use it for future calculations."
tl;dr: Largest and best-funded social science program I've ever seen.
You should check out Facebook. There emotional manipulation studies are horrifying, but they certainly have access to many more person hours of time and collected data than Google does on end users.
I don't want to sound like a hater and I'm very well aware of the fact that some design choices might have affected the company's revenues, but all this discussion involving very smart people discussing what, from a very "outsider-ish" perspective, seem like trivial issues (the color of the letter G, for example) reminds me of Herman Hesse's "Glass Bead Game". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game#Plot)
Isn't that the problem with empirical methods in general? They are great for measuring the effect of small simple things (like small changes to a web page), but are much less effective in measuring bigger things (like say, programming language A vs. programming language B).
The evolutionary, data-driven approach will never yield a Nest thermostat, iPhone, Helvetica, or flag of New Mexico. We have no idea how to even begin to write a fitness function for good design.
Formalizing that process and using externally-collected data is just de-black-boxing something that happens in a black-box form in the professional's mind.
You point out the need to pick the right measurement, and I agree, but it could be as simple as "What's the effect on conversion?" It has to be something! You can't just say "We're re-designing because I'm a HMI genius."
Until then, the best known way to design something nice is to hire a talented designer and trust their instincts.
...for now, given today's technology, but I wouldn't bet on it long term. History is full of examples of things we once thought only humans could do.
But once many candidate designs are available to choose from, what better a way is there to unambiguously decide on the best besides testing and measuring?
But at that point, why not just cut out the middleman, forget the tests, and let the artists be artists?
See also: Footnote 3 of http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html#f3n
BUT, when you're the size of Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft, Things look a bit different.
Most people are far more conservative than they realise, but also, perversely, adapt quite quickly to change if they experience it day-to-day. This means that if an interface has enough inertia, then a change that performs badly in user testing, can actually quite quickly be accepted by people. (PROVIDED it's actually better).
In the first example, every change to the Facebook UI is met by a barrage of criticism and hatred, but they seem to actually make good decisions, so the changes get absorbed by users, and things continue.
Having said that, Microsoft struggle, because they often make changes that are fundamentally bad decisions, and have to back-down. For example, the Office ribbon took a while to be accepted, but is /generally/ liked nowadays by people, because it was functionally a good change (yes, some people will disagree, but the majority wins on this front). Taking broad user testing results on the ribbon would probably have stopped microsoft from progressing with it. On the other hand, the 'Metro'/Tile UI in windows 8 was an actual usability disaster, and has forced them to revert to a more common pattern until someone can design new metaphors that actually improve usability in windows.
Finding test subjects that aren't used to, and comfortable with, the google font/design styles, to give objective feedback on a change, is really hard.
[ I didn't mention first time round, but I /really/ don't like the new logo, that lowercase g makes me cringe inside every time I see it. ]
The trick is: there is no global "better" — only 'better', given a specific group of users.
Which users though? Running a million 40 year olds from Iowa through your website flow will generate a widely different result from running a million 13 year olds in Atlanta through the same process.
Google is still stuck in the "one design for everybody in the world" mindset, so they have to be appealing to everybody, which naturally makes them bland.
success metrics you're using
Success metrics! The paradox of these hyper-optimization methods is they largely apply in hyper-trivial situations. Once you are big enough, you just tell people how things will be. They don't get to have a say anymore.
And you can't rely on past data to create new trends because that data doesn't even exist.
Data said that children's books don't sell. But then Harry Potter happened. Data also said that people loved phones with keyboards. Then the iPhone happened.
That's because they were designing a favicon, not doing a rebrand. Using a different font than your logo would make absolutely no sense.
I believe I have successfully refuted that claim.
Most design problems are this way. Even after you fix them they are often not obvious to the user despite improving the UX.
I view Heineken as a boring lager which has little character, probably due to being produced in industrial quantities. A jaunty 'e' isn't going to fix that.
Same for google. So long as they continue to bang out appropriate search results I'm with them. Right until they don't.
That tilted 'e' is meant to advertise the brand in the middle of dozens of other logos in the store, and draw consumers in from that myriad of choices based on psychological cues and associations they may not even be aware of. The effect is important in aggregate - some large number of potential customers conditioned over a lifetime of advertising to associate different typographic styles with emotional states and narratives being slightly more conducive to pick your beer over others than they otherwise might have been, because now it's 'nicer.'
Objective support for this hypothesis is thin on the ground.
In reality logos are nowhere near the top of the list of factors that drive a buying decision. Whatever bounce effect businesses get from a new logo can usually be explained just as much by novelty as by implied psychological voodoo.
Generally, I'm suspicious of management-by-logo. When I see logos being updated at vast expense for no good reason, I worry about the direction a company is heading in.
And everybody else in the world.
> In reality logos are nowhere near the top of the list of factors that drive a buying decision.
Great. Then replace the Chanel or Louis Vuitton logos with a bright primary colored Google logo, and see what their purse sales are like a year from now. I'm sure millionaire socialite women would love to have their bright red-blue-green-yellow logos on their Saint Laurent jacket (although it would be perfect for Moschino...)
Sorry dude, but you're over thinking this. Logos are part and parcel to brand identity, and everything about branding determines sales.
If you don't have a good logo, you don't have a good business.
Google's search engine has a separate function that stands on it's own two feet irrespective of a change to an 'e'.
> If you don't have a good logo you don't have a good business
Come on my good man, get a grip!
Some do. The vast majority of designer clothes don't.
People buy the brand, not the product.
> Google's search engine has a separate function that stands on it's own two feet irrespective of a change to an 'e'.
People bought into the Google brand identity. They were the first to eliminate all the crap around their web search engine, so it would just be a single text box. This made sure people know what Google was - the simple search interface. All of this is part of the brand's visual identity.
Do you think they do an empirical study on this when they first made it?
It is your brand that sells your product.
The shape of the letter 'e' is part of that marketing that sells your product.
In fact, EVERYTHING you do is fundamentally related to sales. You are always closing.
This is backwards - the product sells the brand. Brands do not just come out of nowhere; people have to like the product first before they can establish loyalty.
crappySearch(searchTerm.remove("Jeeves how do I"));
Catull³, the font on which the former Google wordmark was based (it's not exactly Catull — some details are simplified, like the serif edges being snapped to 45°), is actually closer to the script than to typical Venetian typefaces — which, once you've seen the whole thing, blows the idea of the old logo looking ‘more professional’ out of the water, unless your profession is ‘medieval scribe’.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox-ATypI_classification#Human...
I agree ... but this is just the price for showing up at this level of the game. It is of course a major effort for those professionals who executed on it, and is beyond my capabilities - but it's not strategic level stuff - just like stealth fighters are not strategic level stuff anymore.
(My previous and clearly downvote-magnet post that is a little more detailed):
An updated, simple look and feel is not a matter for congratulations. Look at stealth airplanes. If you don't have a stealth warplane, the modern SAMs can take you out no problem, with stealth the odds are much more in your favour. Stealth tech is the table stakes, the price any superpower or superpower-to-be must pay just to show up.
If Google had not done this, or had done it badly, then we would worry. Behind the scenes many many professionals worked hard to make sure it went well - as expected.
This is something I personally would never achieve - I could not steer a multi-national rebranding. But Google has to - it's the price just for staying in the game.
So kudos to those involved, it took years of your experience and effort. But for Google, it's just what needed to be done to keep up. And if we should not be distracted, internally they really must not be distracted.
Non est disputandum I guess.
However I think the colour blocking and letter shaping on the new favicon is superb.
... don't know what else to say. I question if their designers use their own products.
Latest bugs worth mentioning: Chrome still has an issue that can cause microphone to not work in Hangouts. Gmail.com has added a "Your plug-in google talk will no longer be supported soon" ...
It used to work fine. The big problem with the current version is the almost complete absence of legible affordances.
There are all kinds of buttons with logos on them that do stuff. But until you learn what they do, their functions are mysterious.
Basic things like Traffic used to be obvious, one-click features. Now they're hidden in the burger menu, so at best they're two clicks away, and at worst a non-trivial percentage of users has no idea they exist. (Etc.)
Not all the time, but enough of a difference that it feels seriously hindered post redesign.
I guess it's just the sacrifice we make for a cool looking web page.
I have no idea how to switch between satellite and map view. I have no idea where to look for that option - or if that option exists. There's a burger menu, so I tap that. There's a list of options. Satellite is in that list, and is highlighted. The option I want, and I don't know what it's called, doesn't appear to be in that list of menu items. I tap the map to collapse the burger menu. I hold the screen then release. A pin is dropped. I don't think I want a pin, but I have no idea how I dismiss the pin. When the pin is placed a small thing pops up at the bottom of the window. None of that looks relevant. I, completely accidentally, pull it, and a bit more appears. None of that is relevant either (but now I've accidentally discovered how to get street view). I pull it again because something happened the first time and yet more stuff appears, but nothing relevant. I realise that it can't be this hard, so I go back to the burger menu and unintuitively click "satellite". I don't want satellite, and this menu item is already highlighted, and it never occurs to me that someone would put a toggleable item in a list of menu entries without any indication that it's a toggle. But bamn there it is.
So, how would I change Maps? Just put a few more affordances in there. Maybe watch how people unfamiliar with the app try to do stuff.
There are lots of things I like about maps. There's some churn in businesses on my street and maps always seems happy to change info.
In the past there was a ton of research into user interaction with UI. Obviously loads of that fails on mobile, but Google is a smart data driven company that could create a new body of work for mobile.
Scroll wheel should zoom in instantly (go to maps.bing.com for how to do this a little better, though to be fair to everyone Bing did take a step towards Google in the last ~month with their maps update and it is much slower. It used to be open as soon as you hit enter in the address bar)
Generally the maps could label streets more frequently. Far too often I'm confused about what street I'm looking at because the label is somewhere off screen.
Also, the new faux-3d effect in the satellite imagery is really irritating.
1. Ensure you can enter two addresses into the search delimited by " to " and it be able to correctly split into directions, as you would expect. I tend to expect this to work and it took maps messing this up several times on different occasions to burn it into my head to put the destination address in the search, then click on directions, then enter my starting address.
2. If I type in "from (address)" and search it should show my address in the top of the directions from/to and focus on the "to" field. This is really broken currently, because it always seems to think I want directions to somewhere instead of from. Similarly, if I type in "to (address)" it should open directions and place the address in the correct field.
3. Sometimes the "near me" feature doesn't work. Try it with all sorts of things like "bathroom near me" and see how well it works.
Speaking of mass transportation, it'd be great if Alphabet could spend some money and effort on that. It makes much more sense from a business point-of-view than Google cars do- how much more R&D money is going to be sunk on that before all is said and done? Will it be worth it? Electric cars have to get their energy from somewhere, and everyone having their own car takes a toll on the environment. I understand it's a big place, but if you have the money to roll out fiber and wifi everywhere, you can buy buses, which are much cheaper.
I (and all my friends) switched to here.com maps after Google has horribly old (2005) data, has a horrible UI, and is generally unusable. In many cities in my region whole districts are completely missing from the maps[1], MapMaker is not available, and in general it’s just a huge mess.
Even worse: It loads so slowly (compared to here.com or bing.com or openstreetmap.org) that sometimes it takes several minutes to load an area while competitors load instantly.
And then there are cities where Google tried to add the new 3D buildings, but the result is so horrible that the satellite view is not usable anymore, for example Vienna [2]
[1]: Compare https://goo.gl/maps/e4awg https://www.here.com/?map=54.35326,10.0714,17,satellite [2]: https://goo.gl/maps/LUHiN
------
And here some suggestions:
- Allow the user to turn of 3D buildings. They are annoying, kill loading times, and are buggy and just a mess of polygons that looks more like abstract art than buildings.
- Use recent satellite imagery. When Bing and Here maps have images that are 10 (!) years newer than what Google uses, it’s just inacceptable
- Stop having a UI where everything changes while people click on it – Google’s own guidelines say that you should keep stuff predictable. Especially due to the slow loading times people often try to click somewhere, while they try to click some box moves, and they click something completely different. This is extremely frustrating, I’d even begin to call it clickjacking.
I, and everyone I know now switched to here, and we’ll probably stick with that for the next years.
- goo.gl-Link to this map
- Terrain-mode
- collapse white search box w/o loosing all entered data
- enter 'from:xxx to:yyy' for navigation
- extra stops (routing)
The best thing about maps that I really love (and why I am willing to fight with the UI) is the address recognition: I can put almost anything into the search box and it will find the address I had in mind. No street/city separation, no extra box for businesses, no strict order of name, address, zip code, city. And if it's unclear to maps, the suggestions almost always include what I had in mind.
- extra stops: once you've set up a basic route, a little plus appears under neath the red target marker in the dialog box, however, this does not seem to work with public transport routing
No idea about the other ones. Personally, I'm slightly miffed about the fact at some point the keywords "home" and "work" stopped working, or that Gmaps sometimes accepts English words in the search query (as in 'X to Y'), but sometimes only German words ('X nach Y'), despite my OS and browser language set to English.
- Stop hijacking basic user interactions like the mouse click. On desktop, if you click the map it will reverse geocode where you clicked (and show you the nearest road to it.) Although I understand the utility of such a feature, I have never ever wanted that. I live in NYC and no one has a car. I just want to change focus off of the constantly expanding and moving navigation window thing. I search for something, then click the background, and now my search is gone. Then I click the location area to get my search back, and nothing happens. I click the background to get rid of the stupid useless direction window, and now everything is gone. Oh, except the thing I clicked is now reverse geocoded for me. Infuriating.
- I challenge people to do the following on desktop: share a location in the middle of a park (hint: drop a pin first)
b. On Android, add a menu option to download maps - "OK MAPS" is not obvious, easy to remember or in any way sensible in the slightest.
c. Make 3D mode work smoothly on an Android tablet. I have the LTE version of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition and it is jerky, stuttery and slow in 3D mode. Compared to Apple maps on the base model iPad3 next to it, it is poor indeed.
* Remember which city I'm in and index search results FIRST against my historical results and SECOND against local results and LASTLY against the world database at large. It's very frustrating re-opening google maps app, tying in something I queried for 10 minutes before and it starts auto-completing to somewhere across an ocean or two.
Sometimes I just do a general Google search (from Chrome's omnibar with Instant searching disabled) for the directions I need. It usually auto-detects it's a maps query and has a card ready to go with options. Then I don't have to wait for suggestions to load or for the map to pan around.
Even worse: It loads so slowly (compared to here.com or bing.com or openstreetmap.org) that sometimes it takes several minutes to load an area while competitors load instantly.
And then there are cities where Google tried to add the new 3D buildings, but the result is so horrible that the satellite view is not usable anymore, for example Vienna [2]
[1]: Compare https://goo.gl/maps/e4awg https://www.here.com/?map=54.35326,10.0714,17,satellite [2]: https://goo.gl/maps/LUHiN
More generally the entire move from words to pictograms looks to me like a regression to a technology that was superseded by a superior one 5000 years ago.
Now I just don't go to YouTube when something on Gmail piques my interest.
That one click was a huge amount of effort for casual browsing, and forces a re-evaluation of idle browsing between properties.
Even today, years afterwards, I was on the phone checking my calendar and I totally lost the train of the conversation as I was hunting in that dumbass thing for the calendar.
The worst part is that, yes, the top was getting stuffed, but instead of letting you choose what you wanted in your menu, they added that navigation monstrosity instead.
And can't you customize that menu? Just make it work for you.
Now, I just rely on Firefox’ autocompletion of the URL bar, or I just use Thunderbird instead of GMail, or here.com maps instead of Google maps.
I expect it to be in the drop down on the left, since Gmail and Google Calendar are otherwise so well integrate, but nope, it is hidden in the little square.
The first couple times I had to actually Google how to access my calendar from within Gmail (I can always go to calendar.google.com of course)
So, just to give a counter point.
1. Someone (or a group of people) within mistakenly believes this design aesthetic[1] is good and have gained a lot of political power. I guess they like things that look pretty in screenshots instead of things that are actually useful or intuitive?
2. They're heavily optimizing for some metric (engagement, user growth, whatever) that is orthogonal to (or has a small component along) the usability vector.
[1] Simplistic defaults, not easily configurable, flat, tons of whitespace, etc...
I disabled priority inbox on browser and mobile devices and it's very usable again, so thanks to whoever kept that as an option.
I understand the "let's not confuse the user" approach but simplifying everything down to have zero features reduces the computer to a useless tool, as all the features have gone. It's like a Swiss army knife where they decided that all the blades and options were too fiddly and confusing so they just give you a spork instead.
https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident...
That's huge for low-bandwidth users.
Here, the sad response to slow web page load times on mobile is normally "just get a modern internet connection!" or "use 4G" etc. but if we had desktop apps that took forever to load, you'd hear complaints pretty soon. A response of "get a faster computer" isn't accepted there, and accepting all this boatload of javascript isn't good either.
I can't remember the link but the average page size has been skyrocketing the past few years, which I think is sad. All that network traffic, electricity usage and CPU processing just for the same jQuery code to be flung across the Internet a billion times.
While Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft all have their own branded spinners, Google has probably had both the most visually adventuresome and the most inconsistent spinners across all its products. Beyond unifying these, though, one can see this as a step past mere unification, and an attempt to take ownership of an unavoidable part of the cloud paradigm, latency. It's a pretty interesting move in terms of branding-UX coordination.
* "It looks like fridge magnets for kids! I don't like it; the iconic lower case g is gone cause of designers obsession of san-serif == modern."
* "Glad that they continue to embrace their playful culture tho."
* "You know what, it's growing on me."
* "Haha, they tilted the e, how cute. Oh god what is happening to me!?"
* "Geeze, how old is Google books? They haven't even updated the logo!"
Not into that G yet. I think I'll call them oogle from now on.
(b) The new one looks overly simplistic – and too geometric. It ignores the lessons typographs have learnt in centuries. Usually, you want glyphs that look balanced – the new logo does not look balanced.
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 of the logo.
[0] https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident...
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.
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.
Anything them there MBA-types do is bullshit, am I right? In fact, I have no idea why Google doesn't run from the command line only!
I'm sure glad to have HN around to tell me how most of the machinations of a large global corporation are pointless.
By the way, do you have one shred of evidence that this was a VP looking to get promoted?
Petty? Yes. Did it effect their market share? By at least 1 - yes.
I highly doubt I was the only one to act like that. Design matters. Even if you don't think it does.
E:
For those wondering, I also didn't enjoy listening to Panic! At the Disco. They also eventually dropped the !.
Ah, but it will. When you're a company like Google, with hundreds of millions of users a day, it's only a matter of time that something like an outdated logo will start to lose you customers. People make sub-conscious inferences about your product based on appearance. If you start looking like that thing everyone used to use, they'll start looking for alternatives.
This redesign was for Google executives, not Google users.
My personal process for using Google (not saying everyone is the same, but...) goes something like this:
1. Type "g" into the address bar
2. Press enter, because www.google.com auto-populates at that point
3. Start typing my query while the animation of the day is loading
4. Press enter
5. Review the results
This was the part where I literally thought "How do they come up with this bullshit?".
It doesn't sound genuine at all.
But the new one is nice, and the functionality behind it from scaling to leading the users through task-flows just makes too much sense.
And like the shift on iOS, I probably won't like the aesthetics of the old design compared to the new in a few days anyway.
But yes, most redesigns are done just for the heck of it. I have a pretty uncharitable opinion of design and designers too, if only because very few Silicon Valley designers seem to have any idea how the users experience (and hate) their work. (I remember back when I heard about Google doing heavy testing with normal users before making changes, and it's very clear that that stopped when Duarte stepped in.)
Poorly performing animations do not work that way.
It definitely didn't look dated. That's because no other tech company in the world imitated Google's choice to use a font inspired by 15th century typography that literally looks like it was created with a calligraphy brush.
The solid colors seem too "loud" to me; they should probably be pastel. I think they are more noticeable now because the letters are so thick.
Also, the capital "G" looks wrong; I think the part that looks most strange is the upper curl, which doesn't seem to go far enough.
Microsoft's italic bold lettering was iconic. It was the logo the company had used for the longest time, the logo that adorned their best (and their worst) products. It was a logo that everyone had seen, everyone knew, that was incredibly recognisable.
And then they threw that all away, and created intentional brand confusion by swapping their logo for the Windows logo, then completely replacing Windows' logo with a grayscale tilted pane of glass.
Why? Why fix what's not broken? Why replace the well-known with the unrecognisable?
Google's logo, the one they used from 1999-2010, was also iconic. It was easily readable: it had a typeface made for legibility and style, not made to be mathematically simple. It contrasted well with any background. It was the logo that everyone knew.
And while this particular change isn't quite so drastic as Microsoft's was, it's still strange to me. Why is it necessary? People surely won't think less of Google for sticking with the one they've used for so long. It doesn't make them look dated: they had already tweaked the hues and the drop-shadow slightly so it fits in. And the company's not headed in some radical new direction that they need to symbolically gesture about.
I don't get it. I probably never will.
It's largely arbitrary what a company's logo looks like to me, but aesthetically this change seems largely unnecessary.
The tilted monochrome pane of glass is truly funny.
I can't imagine the nightmare it must updating the logo for a company like Google. There must be so many forgotten places that will be missed.
EDIT: Can someone tell me how this comment is somehow objectionable? It's not like every app they publish on the Play Store or every site they have at *.google.com is using Material.
The change has gone very smoothly on the web, but yes I am pretty sure that in some dark corners of their least used properties, there are some forgotten logos.
I'm so glad we're mostly rid of useless ornamentation: endless bevels, drop-shadows, gradients, and skeuomorphism...
There are many different takes on flat design, so it's not a design mono-culture. Google, Microsoft and Apple all have unique, flat, design languages.
Yes, they all use a different color scheme.
I'm also interested in learning about some alternative designs though.
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's a minefield.
It's not particularly the "flat" design that's at fault here, but it's lumped with this simultaneous trend of feature deletion and cryptoUI.
No right clicking, no long press, overflow style menus are meant to be used sparingly.
Unfortunately, most design programs don't actually teach these foundational skills. That means there are a lot of designers out there who are forced to work in an oversimplified print-design style to hide their incompetence.
As someone who hires for this stuff, finding skilled designers is unimaginably hard.
I hear designers constantly complaining about the lack of jobs. They're full of it. The problem is the lack of skilled applicants. Design has become filled with lazy people, while being arguably one of the hardest fields to be good at. I've had ads out in a major US city for months for a very good paying design job, and have yet to see a portfolio that looked even moderately professional.
That's really where this all comes from, flat design hides designer incompetence.
It's not a pay issue as best as I can tell.
If a skilled surgeon (or someone 5+ years into their career at Goldman, etc) makes 4 times the median of your city, what does the median have to do with what they're worth?
Sorry, not trying to be rude, but whenever I hear people saying they "can't find anyone", they still counter that they're offering enough...and yet they still can't fill the position. It doesn't make any sense.
So I don't think if I were a good graphic designer now, I'd be stoked on 70k a year in most locales.
richard [|)07] laborde [@7] gmale
I've always viewed success as passionate curiosity. If the mindset is there, but not the skill, you can teach the later.
Maybe change the job title and see what happens?
Agree strongly that good designers are very hard to come by - it takes years of experience combined with some level of innate talent to be a top level designer.
Flat animated is sort of where it is at now. Google's material would fall under flat animated as well as much of iOS 8/9, but drop shadows and gradients are better replaced with subtle tones and accenting along the lines of posterized Anime art [1].
As a designer if you can make Google and Apple's latest efforts look dated, you've done an excellent job. Flat 3d sort of does that.
--
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=flat+3d+ui&es_sm=93&source=l...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=posterized+art&es_sm=93&sour...
I find myself reminded of an xkcd strip: https://xkcd.com/915/
Anyone remember Colorforms? http://www.liveandlearn.com/shop/images/Original_Colorforms....
It doesn't actually convey any brand to me, just a very safe interpretation of Material Design. That seems short-sighted to me, since an identity typically lasts much longer than a design language.
Just kidding, I like it =)
On a positive note, the logo image (http://googleblog.blogspot.ru/2015/09/google-update.html) is well optimized with Zopfli (https://github.com/google/zopfli). However, I don't see why the new logo is smaller (from here – https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident...). I could bring down the size of the previous one (http://i.imgur.com/lfmoqgP.png) to 8 174 bytes (originally 14 022 bytes) vs 13 804 bytes for the new one. Of course, SVG versions are both much smaller.
When you see it that way, it's almost an admission of guilt. No company would put so much emphasis on child imageries if it weren't fearing so much. Google is accused of controlling your life, so it's using the symbol of the exact opposite of "in control", aka small children.
Automatic photos classification is just the most visible iteration of the tech.
I do, and it's not always a good thing.
Also, I don't think I'm a fan of that new typeface. The cutesiness with the rotated 'e' on the end is sort of teeth-grating to me: it breaks up the rhythm of the rest of the wordmark.
Screenshotting the doodle, the counters are 24×26 pixels. Not perfect circles, and not tilted.
HN discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161043
A bit of a side note, but I've recently been pondering for how long material design will stay with us. I'd guess when the developer for that last Jelly Beanish app in my phone has finally made the switch, Google releases their new design guidelines and the process begins again...
Material Design will probably be suddenly replaced by something with an equally trendy name when Google needs more PR.
I love it when pages that talk about “cross platform“ behave this way.
The Microsoft logo and the Google logo are very similar in style: http://i.imgur.com/s7kR6jJ.png
The blocks in the middle are the colors from both the logos.
The yellow is very, very similar.
Here is an example:
http://www.atarimania.com/2600/boxes/hi_res/yars_revenge_col...
(look at the first line, with its slanted e -- like the last e in Google.)
More observations on Atari Abahaus here:
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/164954-deans-foods-using-at...
http://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/nexu...
This latest logo is... I don't have the right words. Looks daycare copy. Welcome to Google. We're not useful, we're safe.
It also does not work with the country subtitle. These are touching the letter "e", perhaps showing they forgot to test this with different country names and x-height.
What recent products are you thinking of?
I can't count the times Google Maps inexplicably zooms out to show me my directions to a coffee shop 10 minutes from me at the level of the entire state. Or when I type in "home" (which I have set), it suggesting I travel to a place in London called "Home Sweet Home" (I'm from the US). Or sometimes just zooming all the way out to show me my location at the global scale when I want to know what's near me.
If anyone needs that, to disable these logos just add this URL:
https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/*
Seriously, though, it's probably a better logo. It's simpler and has a more weight while the old one was kind of overly light and spindly. I wouldn't be surprised if the next step in the logo's evolution would ditch the candy colors and go with a single color, in which the new logo would look just fine. That might strike some as sacrilege but it would work much better as a logo and look less like a set of plastic toys for preschoolers.
I'm curious how Brand New will rate it.
[1] https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-ident...
The link you provide is interesting. However, any technical explanation doesn't solve the optical illusion that the last three letters appear to be closer together than the first three letters.
That pretty much means the trademark is essentially gone.
My first thought, wait who's talking to me here?
Right in the first minute:
> What if surveillance didn't look this scary? What if it actually looked pretty friendly? Could we still identify it as a threat?
"Privacy is a set of experiences that help people feel comfortable", HAH, i love this corporate-speak.
It reminds me of the way the new PR field of Content Creation, which defines itself like:
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketi...
"Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent"
Lets enhance make our buyers more intelligent. Intelligent in this context meaning, the customer buys our product. Lets give the user privacy. Privacy meaning a thin veneer of privacy on top of complete data mining.
The amount of marketing-speak in the blog post does make me a little queasy though.
Only groups is unreadable without javascript.
But they recently killed the old style google maps, the new one is horrid.
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Rockwell...
You know: "Even the 'E' was crooked."
On the new logo... just went to google.com for the first time today. Ugh, no. I winced when I saw it.
Not hating, I actually like the new look, it was just the first thing I thought of when they mentioned the original "ten blue links".
I myself do not like this redesign, but I also did not like the old one. I am basically very averse to changes like this (probably a mental issue). I also do not like how Chrome hijacks the window style, or how Android automatically updates to a new Youtube app with a drastically new UI. I am probably a minority though, and still capable to use custom styles to change the logo back to the old "Backrub" logo, but I wonder if there are more who see these major redesigns as an invasion of sorts into their daily routines. Just as you created a mental map of the application, they change the location of the buttons, or show a different favicon.
If it is not too much to ask (or risky to maintain), think of keeping an "old.*.com" domain. There are users who will gladly make use of that. Being able to use your own design, or turn off "with this new logo we save 9999 bytes on mobile" distractions is also UX. And it would be good UX for me.
With this new logo, for me, the counter now starts at zero for Google. A clean slate. For all I care they may be the Facebook they so desperately desire to mimic.
Blah blah... I don't care about Google's logo, but I use my iPhone like a commodity and use Google's apps and services for the most important things. There are iPhone only apps I like, but when it comes to my mobile needs it's all about making calls (phone, a commodity), getting on the web (Chrome), and directions (Google Maps) dominates 2 of those 3.