Google Introducing New Visual Design Across All Products
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
First, it's mentally oppressive. The black bar at the top is like working in a room with a low ceiling painted black all day. It makes you feel boxed in.
Next, lighter colors that exist in the sky (blues, greys) tend to work better at the top of interfaces. If you consider the screen to be your full field of vision and relate it to what your eyes normally see when outside, the top-most area of the screen is "the sky". Making the absolute top part of a webpage black makes me think about a black sky which is ominous and indicates a storm is coming.
Finally, it just looks unfriendly and robotic. Blue is a more humanistic color and is more pleasing. I can't think of a worse choice for this newly-redesigned top bar than the dark grey/black they decided on.
Really? Did you try much, because... danger red, hot pink, puke green... that took like three seconds to think up. Ergo, I think you are engaging in at least quite a bit of hyperbole here, leading me to consider dubious pretty much everything else you said.
Yep. The old blue on white background strip was easy to look at. The new color never looked good on Blogspot. Sometimes a single bad design choice can tip the balance between making something pleasant to use, or not.
An example: I upgraded my version of Open Office a month ago, for the first time in 3 years. There was one single change they made with the margin color in the word processor so when the left cursor is sitting at the left margin, I can't see it very easily. Because I move around documents a lot, and let the cursor sit while rereading, this is quite irritating. After a month, I've started pasting OO document text into Wordpad for editing, and repasting them into Open Office when complete. I sometimes wonder if a spy for Microsoft was behind that margin color change.
Another example: I only started using Open Office because Wordpad was similarly crippled by Microsoft a few years ago (starting with XP service pack 2, I think). Whenever you save a document, the page view changes so the cursor's at the top, also irritating after no problems with versions up to then. But I'm using it again because it seems a little less irritating than that Open Office change, which I can't find any way to fix in the menus. I suspect in that case Microsoft deliberately crippled it to force users to fork out for MS Office.
So perhaps this change will tip the balance for some users who want a new search engine. Perhaps a spy for Baidu was behind the change, or someone who's "family back home" has been influenced by Baidu.
I stand by my comment about the little things, e.g a non-changeable bad menu bar color in Google, prodding users over to Bing or Baidu.
Can't go any deeper, so here goes:
LCDs are clear by default with a big light behind them. You can see this on any Apple laptop, the glowing logo is just the backlight (watch it fade as you lower brightness or try shining a flashlight through it). White (clear) is the default state, so it takes power to make a color. Think of an LCD watch, all of the text is black because LCDs can't create light (those are LEDs).
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fic...
Of course, it's a minuscule difference, since I'm guessing that the giant light probably uses most of the power, not the actual LCD.
This is the opposite of CRTs (hence the "90s" comment), which do actually create brightness per-pixel.
EDIT: Oh, you've edited your comment
False. Organic LED displays don't use a backlight. They use less energy to display dark colors, just as vibrunazo said.
However I think it should default to the light blue and be saved as a cookie for those who prefer not to be logged into gmail all the time.
The black bar at the top is like working at night time, Google (the content) being the light that guides the way. Blue bars work well on the bottom, giving the feeling of floating peacefully in the ocean, yet at the top cause distress - as if the user is drowning. Yes, I'm making this shit up and trying to sound as ridiculous as OP.
that black bar is so oppressive.
The parent of my comment might be making some joke about the 41 shades of blue that Zeldman said.
And quote from him, "There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle." http://www.zeldman.com/2009/03/20/41-shades-of-blue/
I don't know what "soon" is.
(DISCLAIMER: I work at Google, but do not work on consumer products and have no particular info about this).
Serious question.
You nailed it with this one. This is how Google rolls. They prefer generic screens to ones that are designed by humans, because they want to convey the idea that Google is not a curated source of information, but a machine generated unbiased view of the world.
I'm generalizing a bit, but this is almost verbatim what was written in In the Plex.
So are we doing astrology next or going straight to phrenology?
I was replying to the idea that they chose a more 'robotic' design than a 'humanistic' one. And used a piece from a book in which a Googler pretty much said the same thing.
Obviously the people who criticise the lack of updates are not the same people who are criticising the update.
This observation can only make sense if you aggregate the public into a single person represented by the loudest complaining minority's opinion at any given time. Well, yes, then that person would be wildly inconsistent. But it doesn't actually exist.
I am thoughtlessly grouping a large group of people together and making an argument against them.
My bad.
Even if that is not the base reason, it is interesting to consider.
How is this supposed to be an improvement? I feel like they changed it just for the sake of change without any actual focus on usability.
This is a company that cared so, so much about every pixel of their homepage. And yet, they've just introduced a whole new set of colors and styles in one go.
I won't go as far as calling this the start of goog decline. But it's def headed to bloatland IMO.
Also, you don't like google instant? I thought that was one of the best features they've implemented in any of their products since... well, for a really long time.
I preferred the lighter theme personally…
But they still have this _blank opening new tabs for mail, cal and everything. That's just bad.
I hope the new guy on top didn't start thinking "Let's be more like Steve's company". :)
Edit: If you can't stand the black bar either, just switch to the secure version of Google: https://encrypted.google.com/ They haven't changed it yet and it usually lags behind on updates.
(DISCLAIMER: I'm an intern at Google)
Chrome: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2393
Not really; websites may ask for speech input (using the 'speech' attribute[1] in certain HTML tags), but the browser keeps full control of the feature, so they can't enable it themselves without your intervention.
Of course, since Google controls Chrome, they can control that too, but on the other hand, they already could - any native app can record sound. The solution for that is simply not installing applications you don't trust.
Coca-cola bottle, iPod shuffle and the London telephone booths revisited: http://post.ly/2IeYK