0Google’s unbreakable design
This article was written by nemetral.
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Note: this post is a down-to-earth trackback to the Official Google’s Blog latest post about “What makes a design Googley?”.
In a more basic way than the much abstract principles explained in the aforementioned article, here are five principles that, to my view, can sum up pretty well a “Googley design” as we can experience it for years:
- use Arial, no matter what
- keep the default blue for hyperlinks (and don’t remove the underline)
- go for rounded corners, definitely
- leave a lot of white space
- do not style form buttons
In a word: raw design. Now I don’t say this design is awful. Voices have already contested Google’s design style (and some folks out there have even redacted comprehensive proposals to revamp Google’s search interface) but I won’t. On the contrary, Google’s design principles used to give me two sensations/expectations in terms of UX (user experience):
- there’s such an impressive server-side engine underhood delivering basic this html design
- apps are in perpetual beta.. and one day maybe the design will be consolidated among them
Time went by and the design consolidation I was expecting didn’t really happen (look at Yahoo! homepage and you’ll have an idea of what I was naively expecting for Google’s). Of course, it is now possible to switch from one Google App to the other with the top-bar, but that’s still not what I’d call a consolidated design.
After all these years, the user experience I now have when using Google apps is threefold:
- still this feeling of power coming from a top-notch server-side architecture
- extreme decoupling between Google’s applications (as if the unconsolidated design ruled the apps server-side background)
- raw but unbreakable design
And believe me, the last one is perhaps the most important. If Google’s design is that raw, it’s not because they lack designers (they even hire the best ones), it must be a voluntary decision. A marketing decision? Maybe. I don’t mean to dive again in the polemic after Soble published his famous post on anti-marketing design, but yes I think Google’s raw design looks unbreakable, more or less consciously, gives the user the feeling that its server-side technology is unbreakable as well.
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