
Google Design - EddieRingle
http://www.google.com/design/#
======
troycarlson
Am I the only one who gets a headache trying to decipher tile layouts like
this? My eyes bounce back and forth and I still have no idea how the
information is structured or what's important.

I appreciate that Google is sharing all of this though.

~~~
joezydeco
It's gonna get worse before it gets better....

[http://beta.united.com/](http://beta.united.com/)

It it a button? Or a dialog box? Maybe it's an ad. Flip a coin!

~~~
troycarlson
Exactly...I don't understand it :(

The new Azure portal looks very similar and it's borderline unusable. Unless
I'm just resistant to change and will eventually warm up to it but it seems to
violate a lot of fundamental design principles.

~~~
blockross
Kinda of topic but from the PoV of a third-party developper who had to test a
lot of workflows in this new Azure portal: it's indeed a nightmare. Why do I
have to click so many times and watch so many panel opening/closing animations
before getting to basic features?

Also closing 5 panels before opening a new one feels like a huge waste of
time.

------
Animats
The design gives no indication of what's clickable. Reminds me of those Flash
games where you frantically click on things trying to find out what does
something. Except now, everything is a flat-shaded rectangle.

The input side seems confused. In their guidelines, they talk about buttons
having a drop shadow, and less shadow when depressed.[1] Fine. But not all
buttons have a shadow, and not all objects with a shadow are clickable. On
interaction, they write "What will happen if I touch this screen? And then
this icon?"[2] That's a game-like interface. It might be tolerable if there
was an standard, easy way to undo whatever you just did. There's no sign of
that in the guidelines.

There are 84 standard input icons.[3] But no icon dictionary. Help text is so
last-cen. You're supposed to know.

When they finally get to "Buttons"[4], they have a reasonable set of controls.
However, one of them is plain text, with no indication that it is clickable.
That contradicts their principles of material design. If they're going to have
all this pseudo-3D, it ought to be used for all things which behave
differently from their surroundings. But no. Google does suggest the use of a
distinctive floating action button for "promoted actions" (i.e. "Buy").

The output effects are pretty, but that's all this is. Pretty. It's all
output-side. There's no innovation on the input side. It's what you get when
you put graphic designers in charge of a user interface.

[1] [https://www.google.com/design/spec/what-is-
material/elevatio...](https://www.google.com/design/spec/what-is-
material/elevation-shadows.html#elevation-shadows-shadows) [2]
[https://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/responsive-
inte...](https://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/responsive-
interaction.html#) [3]
[https://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/icons.html#](https://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/icons.html#)
[4]
[https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons.html](https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons.html)

~~~
paulojreis
> It's what you get when you put graphic designers in charge of a user
> interface.

You're wrong. That's what you get when engineering-companies start to care
about design: they think design means decoration and don't focus on how it
works, just on how it looks. A real graphic designer would know better than to
fiddle around rippling effects when real issues are at stake.

------
dman
[http://www.google.com/design/videos/making-material-
design/](http://www.google.com/design/videos/making-material-design/) \-
cannot make up my mind if this video is purposely designed to come across as
farce. I could easily imagine this being in a satirical comedy film.

~~~
sesutton
The whole video felt like something Apple would put out.

~~~
illicium
That's precisely the point: Google is trying to convince everyone that they're
as design-driven as Apple.

~~~
agumonkey
I can't tell if it's a 'grass is greener' thing, but after buying a Moto G in
order to enjoy Lollipop/Material thinking the iOS flat redesign was lame.
After a year of usage, I think lollipop isn't an improvement over KitKat, and
worse than iOS (I do believe Apple knows some dark magic when it comes to user
interfaces desktop or mobile).

More and more I'm thinking there are 3 levels of usage for a mobile device.

    
    
      - Fixed and instant: calling/answering/taking a picture
      - Semi instant: finding directions (often less urgent than the previous)
      - Complex: browsing, reading
    

the ~iPhone displaced the first level, which was the norm of dumbphone, fixed
hardware interfaces. More and more OSes are aiming at making everything as the
third. I can't get the lollipop phone interface in my mind, I'm even jealous
of my mother's Bada based samsung.

------
kbd
The most iconic feature of "material design" to me is the "create" button in
the lower right-hand corner. Except if you're in landscape in, say, Gmail,
it's in the center bottom since it's a part of the message list.

Can someone explain why a create button is given this privileged and
inconsistent position instead of being in a menubar like every other button in
every app ever?

~~~
Artemis2
This thing is infuriating, I never remember how to create a new file in Google
Drive now (it's the bottom right FAB located at a place yet unexplored in
every desktop UI ever).

~~~
nightpool
Huh? This is a screenshot of my google drive:
[http://imgur.com/oGjzhTJ](http://imgur.com/oGjzhTJ)

as you can see, "new" is in the same place its always been. No FAB.

EDIT: in retrospect, you might be talking about the docs site.
(docs.google.com rather then drive.google.com) I spose the only thing I have
to say about that is that no design guidelines are a magic bullet, and that I
have no idea why they even have that separate docs site.

~~~
Artemis2
> you might be talking about the docs site

That's the one! Google's products are so confusing sometimes.

------
exodust
Material design doesn't scale up very well. On desktop we end up with huge
flat areas or chunky images stretched beyond their size.

Massive scaled chunks. Even on mobile it's just a stack of coloured boxes.

I like some aspects of material design like the paper philosophy, the fine
shadows, buttons, and other things that do well on mobile. But more work is
needed to improve the desktop interface.

Remember seeing iPhone apps scaled up to iPad screen size? That's how a lot of
websites look now on desktop screens.

~~~
mattmanser
It doesn't scale down well either, on mobile everything is too spaced out so
the information density is terrible. The calendar app on android is a farce.

They've also released the 'improved' notes app, you now have to press buttons
twice just to add a note, it's frustrating and totally idiotic. A hard to use
notes app, great job Material.

~~~
exodust
Could be just poor implementation for those apps of material design - which
you'd hope is fundamentally good at heart.

It does seem fairly casual. Even the Google designers in the video weren't
unified in a definition, so it sounds open and unconstrained. Although I
wouldn't put it past Google to hide an on-brand agenda right there in the
colour theories. One thing I'd move away from is the obsession/requirement of
bright colours. Muted earthy colours would work well too in the right
combinations for maximum emotional effect on unsuspecting visitors!

~~~
mattmanser
Not really, like mentioned elsewhere in the thread the add button in the
bottom right is supposed to be a menu instead of an action.

That means in Material there is no way to do the most common actions if you
use that as designed. Like the mail app I am using at the moment has made that
button both "reply" and "fwd" when you're in an email, which is frustrating as
hell when 95% of the time I want to reply.

But if they just made it reply, where do they put fwd?

~~~
voyou
"the add button in the bottom right is supposed to be a menu instead of an
action."

Not according to Google's Material Design "spec", it isn't: "A floating action
button represents the primary action in an application."
([http://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons-
floatin...](http://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons-floating-
action-button.html#buttons-floating-action-button-floating-action-button))

Additional actions should go on the action bar.

------
johnchristopher
Hmm. Material design is clicking twice on the play button to launch a Youtube
video.

~~~
austenallred
You have to click play _three_ times on mobile. Try it.

~~~
CatsoCatsoCatso
On Google Chrome on my Android no less. What a joke. The video controls kept
appearing unprompted too.

------
antimora
For strange reasons I am getting the same vibe I got when I was viewing
Google's Wave promotion, as if Google had uncovered the best thing ever.
Everyone at Google seems super excited about their new things. I suppose when
they're in their own little silo universe everything seems exciting and right.

Again I am only speaking about the feeling I got after watching the promotion
video.

~~~
chillingeffect
You are totally right. I would just add that the meme "designers are rockstars
and vital to the information age" doesn't originate from Google. It originated
from designers themselves. The designers have now fully infected Google...
None of these problems are new. People have now contemplated them for an
entire generation in science fiction books and movies, video game interfaces,
CAD interfaces, music instrument interfaces, art, Xerox, Media Lab, etc.

Really though, animated interfaces are a short-term fad which is subject to
boom and bust cycles just like 90s icons graduated to high-res icons and then
back to microsoft tile icons. When peoples' hardware can no longer handle the
animations and they learn to associate animation with skipped frames, impeded
workflow, etc., the cycle will revert itself.

~~~
Animats
Visual feedback from user actions is a good idea, provided that 1) it happens
every time, and 2) it happens right now every time, even if it takes time for
the action to complete. Not seeing that mandated.

------
wavefunction
Our design team is trying to use Material guidelines in an upcoming app. I
needed to remind them that while there are good elements in the guidelines,
there is a lot that isn't good and they need to leave those parts behind. This
certainly reinforces that feeling for me.

~~~
wavefunction
lol, downvoted for expressing anti-Material sentiment.

Google design guidelines as put in place by Google are hit-or-miss. Just look
at switching between accounts on say, Google Analytics. Multiple view
refreshes and double the user actions to do what once could be done from the
same view with a click to logout and a click to login followed by typing your
credentials.

~~~
magicalist
Analytics (the app and the site) don't look like they've been updated to
Material Design, they look basically like they always have.

------
pducks32
Idk but I'm not the biggest an of the implementation of Material Design. I
like the principles but some of the elements are just really ugly–i.e. the
huge heroes.

------
skazka16
The first time I saw material design, I thought it's a cool concept. I liked
it. I also liked applications built with this concept. At first, those apps
looked...different. After several months, today, when I see anything designed
with a material design idea behind it, I have a strange feeling. All the
material applications/websites look like they were designed by the same
designer. Imagine there are 10 websites and only one of them is designed with
material concept. How hard would it be to find this 1 out of 10? It seems a
fairly simple task to me. I'm not a designer, but I never had exactly the same
feeling before (i.e. surfing through thousands of flat web sites). I'm not
sure if I want to see thousands of material websites. Does anyone else
experience the same?

~~~
skuunk1
I think that's the point of material design. It's the design equivalent of
egoless programming. You should not be able to tell who wrote/designed
something if it is done properly.

~~~
pbowyer
It's also hugely beneficial for Google if all apps/sites get sucked into
looking the same, so their platform becomes a platform, rather than a gateway
to individual companies.

Beneficial for them, and dangerous for others I fear.

~~~
skazka16
Agree. They are basically trying to "monopolize" the design.

------
miguelrochefort
_We 're no longer controlling every pixel. It's more like jazz improvisation._
\- Matias Duarte

Source? What does that mean?

~~~
stephencanon
Either meaningless nonsense, or displays a complete ignorance of jazz. You
pick.

~~~
agumonkey
No fixed / hard-coded information; everything reacts adapts, is fluid,
interacts with other parts. Compared to how things were done in the past it
seems improvised and free. Not far from jazz.

~~~
stephencanon
My objection is the conflation of [sloppy <\---> precise] with [improvised
<\---> specified]. In reality they're more or less orthogonal qualities; Elvin
Jones, for example, is about as close to a musical equivalent of "controlling
every pixel" as I can imagine.

~~~
agumonkey
I guess jazz is too fuzzy, I heard Miles Davis never played the same note
twice, not sure if conscious or not. Roy Haynes says he's not a metronome and
everything flows with almost no structure.

All in all, it's hard to say if it's controlled or not. These guys have highly
refined skills, even when they change course almost randomly, they know how to
bend time and harmony, nothing is random.

------
pimlottc
[http://www.google.com/design/spec-vr/designing-for-google-
ca...](http://www.google.com/design/spec-vr/designing-for-google-
cardboard/a-new-dimension.html)

My browser window is 1350 pixels wide and the headline is still cut off:
"Designing for Google Cardboar"

------
kelvin0
Is this the Design world's equivalent of the Engineering world's 'over-
engineered' syndrom? I appreciate that these people are trying to innovate,
but it`s almost like they are Designing as for design's sake ... Hope I don't
come off as too negative.

------
bryang
I find myself liking the Roboto typeface more and more... It's got a lot of,
dare I say, character?

And I love that it's 100% free for any use.

------
sandis
[http://i.imgur.com/OnlKapS.png](http://i.imgur.com/OnlKapS.png)

Sure looks like it was improvised and not thoughtfully designed.

------
_random_
Well done Microsoft: inspiring not one, but two major competitors. Metro aka
Modern aka Material rocks!

~~~
bitmapbrother
Fortunately, people really like Material design. Metro was rejected and
ridiculed by the public.

~~~
christianmann
No, they don't. Look at this thread.

------
doczoidberg
there exists the term "overengineered" for technical products. There should be
a term "overdesigned" for user interfaces too.

Material design is a good example for this.

~~~
mjhagen
I think it's overengineerd design.

------
ryanobjc
I like it!

A good test of an organization or person isnt how they are, but how they
adapt. And the signs are promising here.

------
meesterdude
Wow that's bad. That's like microsoft bad. Which, is actually fairly
insightful; is that what happens when an organization gets too big, they lose
sight of what's actually good anymore and just do design by committee?

Also, it's as if... there is only one design. Like, they figured everything
out for you and you should just use that. Bootstrap is not so different in
this, but i get the vibe that this isn't so meant to be tweaked; that's the
air I get about it at least. That what's there is what you should use. Which,
is really arrogant, because it googlfies the web, and by no means for the
better.

But really, I don't know what they're thinking, and I hope this doesn't become
more of a thing; but they only seem to keep pedaling it.

~~~
bsdetector
It's not even design by committee, it's design by clique. It's the Project
Runway of UI design.

At least in the video, nobody is talking about metrics or testing or any
practical consideration. In fact one of the designers says they "are used to
working more practically. This is the first time where we're being pushed and
told, 'don't worry about that'". Yes, don't worry about practicality...

Another says it "is a way for designers to get what they want. [laugh]"

~~~
meesterdude
> It's not even design by committee, it's design by clique. It's the Project
> Runway of UI design.

Well put; and possible even worse!

------
FreakyT
Looks like the monospace font on that page is "Roboto Mono", which seems to be
new.

------
JesperRavn
Google and Apple have both been trolled by the critics of so called
skeuomorphism.

While leather binders and bookshelves are excessive, Apple's pre-flat iOS
design was really good, and all the criticism that lead to flat/material
design was unjustified.

------
estefan
I hate how the little 'action dot' or whatever they call it moves around. On
their colour palette video[1] you can see it sliding all over the place
depending on the screen size. Why can't it just go in the top right like it
always has been, instead of playing a game of 'hunt the dot'? I always have to
remember to look at the bottom of my diary on my phone to add a new entry now
which is pretty unintuitive for me :-(

[1] [http://www.google.com/design/videos/palette-
perfect/](http://www.google.com/design/videos/palette-perfect/)

------
Aleman360
Ah yes, modern web design; too much for my 6-core Xeon workstation to render
smoothly.

~~~
mortehu
It seems to be rendering at 60 fps without dropping frames on my old laptop,
using Chrome.

It's still not worth seeing, though, other than as a warning about what can
happen if you think adding graphical features is more important than solving
problems.

------
CHY872
Web page is nice-looking, but isn't snappy (at least not on my laptop).

~~~
wlesieutre
Scolling is smooth in IE on a Surface Pro 3, but not in Firefox. That's pretty
typical.

What's unusual is that it's visibly janky in Firefox on this desktop with an
i7 and a Quadro FX 580. Sure, it's not a _brand new_ workstation, but it
should be able to scroll a webpage...

~~~
CHY872
Also using Firefox here. It's a MacBook Pro that's a few years old, but is
still fast.

------
BorisMelnik
I'm using the HTC One (M7 a few years old) with Android 5.0. I am a lover of
Android and material design. Unlike a lot of people here, I've found the
overall UX / usability to be very intuitive and easy to use.

One aspect of the new design I really like is native sharing. With as little
as two taps, I can share any photo, video, selected text or other media to
almost any other app (text, gmail etc) with ease.

I am not a huge fan of 'tiled layouts' but I also don't feel as though it is
as tiled focused as Microsoft or others.

~~~
nindalf
Wasn't native sharing always a feature of Android? Did Material Design change
it somehow?

------
freyr
Putting dots in the space between words makes it harder to distinguish word
boundaries, which makes the text difficult to read.

If design hinders usability, it's not good design.

~~~
navanit
Indeed. I work in accessibility/assistive-tech and the dots between words is a
disaster.

------
chuckcode
I appreciate material's approach to replicating real world physics look. I'm
curious though what other designs could be very productive even if they aren't
intuitive out of the box and require some training to use them. Interfaces
like the command line, APIs, text and even human languages require significant
time to learn but they are worth the effort as they allow us to express an
incredible range of concepts succinctly.

------
joeyspn
IMO Material Design is going to have the same problem as Bootstrap. There will
be so many apps and websites with that look and feel that the spec will become
boring in no time.

For a serious app I'd never use plain MD, the same way I never use plain
bootstrap. Each web/app experience should have its own identity. When
everything looks and feels the same way, the "wow factor" disappears.

------
nilkn
I enjoy material design a lot on my Android phone and in the Inbox web app.

Other than that, I find that it can be really overwhelming, as is the case
here. I think it's a problem of constraint. The animations are just so
_heavy_. And everything feels large, including the drop shadows. I actually
experience some minor sense of "claustrophobia" on pages like this.

------
rotub
I'm always amazed at how much people can say about pretty much nothing.

------
skizm
This website is overwhelming with a full screen.

------
nickysielicki
I'm someone very comfortable with the internals of things.

But my design sense is awful. My sites never look as polished as I'd like them
to. How can I get a design sense?

~~~
currywurst
It can be learned, by the same techniques you use to learn system internals:
You can first do a quick scout for the big items (e.g. grid systems,
typography instead of data structures, algorithms) so that you get the big
picture, and then study designs that you like for the details of how they used
these items together (like how you study frameworks, libraries or OSs)

------
phragg
For those of you who weren't aware: this seems like an adaptation to the work
their interns were doing for MaterializeCSS (materializecss.com)

------
tomgg
So many Google sites have 1/3-of-a-page fixed headers; fixed headers suck.

------
campuscodi
Besides the website, have there been changes made to the specifications?

~~~
campuscodi
[https://www.google.com/design/spec/whats-new/whats-
new.html](https://www.google.com/design/spec/whats-new/whats-new.html)

The changelog.... found it

------
cateye
The video sounds really like [http://vooza.com/](http://vooza.com/) video's.

------
robmccoll
Why does a design website have a model in an orange sweater right up against a
salmon-colored tile? That hurts my eyes and my brain.

------
adam12
Hmmm, this minimalist style looks very familiar.

------
brennannovak
"Maybe it's too complex of an idea" a very interesting / perhaps telling
remark from one of the designers

------
sethbannon
"We're no longer controlling every pixel. It's more like jazz improvisation."
Matias Duarte, VP Design @ Google.

Super interesting concept. The abstraction of design.

~~~
ryanSrich
That seems super wand wavy and ambiguous. What is that even supposed to mean?
Anyone have a guess?

~~~
erispoe
It means programmatic design. You design relations and interactions between
things instead of coloring pixels.

~~~
ryanSrich
But ultimately the pixels are colored, are they not? To me this reads as a way
to acceptably talk about degrading designers...

"Well we aren't employing those pesky 'Pixel Pushers' anymore. No. We are
moving towards a jazz inspired design, it's more important and sophisticated
than just coloring pixels"

Please. Give it a rest.

(^ In case it needs to be pointed out that's not an actual quote from anything
anyone said.)

There's no better case for Google putting zero thought into design than this
new website.

I mean what is this?
[http://i.imgur.com/dGCCLzx.png](http://i.imgur.com/dGCCLzx.png) (my attempt
at balancing the grid on the bottom.)

~~~
imaginamundo
Hover the search icon and you have the grid you wish.

I would also do the same thing, isn't because a thing is hidden or need a
gesture/action (in this case, the hover status), that the thing doesn't need
to be in the grid.

~~~
ryanSrich
That's not a very graceful way of handling that though. I'm not saying it's
not ok to break the grid, but at least make it logical. The element isn't even
visible without interaction.

------
ixtli
design eh?
[http://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_ref...](http://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_reference.html)

(spoiler: page renders really poorly in chrome)

~~~
nightpool
Looks like some CSS or something was broken earlier today, because I had the
same experience, but now everything looks fine.

------
stripeless
Did Google fire their UI and UX team? Wow. Is this Web 3.0 - the final chukkah
for full-on awful craptastic interfaces that finally drive us back to lean
text sites?

~~~
Steko
Isn't 'Google Design' a bit of an oxymoron to begin with?

I mean isn't their entire hiring process designed to weed out people whose
strength is design, to the point where now when they need to compete on design
they go out and spend $20 million to acquihire a team ala Sparrow or get a big
name like Duarte.

People laughed at Marissa choosing fonts at Yahoo but forget that she was the
only person holding down the design fort at Google and was undervalued and
passed over.

------
yAnonymous
Google's only design philosophy is to arrange content in a way that maximizes
the profit. If on top of that you can make it look good, cool. If not...
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
alexnewman
Google bragging about design is like the nazis bragging about human rights

~~~
bsaul
Don't be so hard on them, they've done a fantastic job. Material design is a
purely graphic framework, not a way to decide which feature is going where
(which googles still desesperately sucks at).

The guys that created material design should be put in charge much more,
because they're obviously the only one that have a true vision for that
company. To me, that reflection should have been made on the very first
iteration of android. Much like microsoft went with tiles, and ios initialy
went with skueumorphics ui.

~~~
paulojreis
> Material design is a purely graphic framework,

Exactly! And, as such, they should advertise it as it is. Merely graphical
stuff, not an UI revolution, not better usability nor UX (where are the tests
saying so?). I wish they just admit that they're trying to make something
which looks cool (nothing wrong with that), not necessarily better UX-wise.

