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Comment by Queue29 | Hacker News Reader

This looks absolutely horrible on a 4k monitor http://i.imgur.com/jSlw0St.png

Google used to have such a strong visual brand with their fresh, bright, clean, and utilitarian aesthetic.

Material Design really annoys me. Dingy grey backgrounds, unnecessary boxes and shadows, and goofy animation that takes us bad to the bad days of Flash sites.

The irony is, their Material Design documentation is quite colorful. (and makes much better use of white space)

https://material.google.com/

The problem is, no one at Google is using them in an attractive way.

I agree wholeheartedly, it feels like Google took a hundred steps back. MD is very uninspiring in my eyes.

I think MD is not too bad for mobile. But it becomes brutally, unforgivably incompetent at managing white space on the desktop.

I hope that at some point in the future someone has a design epiphany centered around embracing information density.

That's the old design FYI.

Sometimes I feel like Google's design practices are on a death spiral.

I've always thought that maybe they optimize their designs specifically for A/B testability.

If everything is just kind of flat and grey, there's less noise, and it's easier to write A/B tests that produce meaningful results. That also means every product is flat and grey, though.

It could also just be a side-effect of having to appeal to every person on the planet, though. Sort of the design equivalent of a good politician, appealing to the lowest common denominator in all of us. Nothing to object to, but also nothing to love. Just flat and grey, with clearly displayed content and A/B optimized calls to action.

I find it incredibly boring and I'm getting tired of them rolling out new products that all look and feel exactly the same, but I suspect they have numbers that show any big design change would just be leaving money on the table.

It's because their guidelines are based on look and feel (aka "design"), not user experience or use case. They basically have no guidelines for the experience. It's all colors, motion, and size. Each product team then goes off and reinvents the experience, and decides to sacrifice the look and feel guidelines in the process.

The Google+ page doesn't even appear to have any breakpoints, which is against their own guidelines:

https://material.google.com/layout/responsive-ui.html#

Maybe those gutters are reserved for ads?

"Mobile first, desktop never"

Google is pushing "Progressive Web Apps" and "mobile first" really hard... such that the desktop experience is horrible. I love the idea of web apps that load quickly on 3G connections, but not only is it not happening (Google products take a while to load), they look awful in a big monitor.

To be fair, probably 2/3 of the web suffers from this anti-design.

Yeah but this is supposed to be a flagship product from Google. It should be an example of top-tier UX design.

You're being generous.

"Web design isn't the solution. Web design is the problem."

Actually, another huge part of the problem are really crappy default entity properties by the W3C.

I'm not really sure what you want for a single post. On the left with the comments being blocks that scroll out to the right?

What's an example of an app or website you enjoy on a browser screen that wide?

Not OP, but the 'masonry layout' [1] where blocks of content reflow and fill out the available horizontal space is an enjoyable presentation on big screens. It may be familiar from Pinterest and the Tumblr archive page.

Some other examples: [2][3]

[1] http://masonry.desandro.com/layout.html

[2] http://halcyon-theme.tumblr.com/

[3] http://www.erikjohanssonphoto.com/work

Both new and old G+ have this style of layout for the main stream (or at least, multi-column layout). The OP of this thread is specifically in the "one-up" view when you link to a single individual post.

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