stopdesign.com — "Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions."Finally we get the lowdown on why design at Google has failed so miserably over the years.
Mar 20, 2009 View in Crawl 4
soad524Mar 20, 2009
I always thought as google as being a simple design. But now I see Google as having a tough time choosing between 41 shades of blue or what the width of a boarder.
tvarmyMar 22, 2009
That actually did surprise me. I thought that level of nutty attention to detail was limited to Steve Jobs in the industry.
upgr4y3ddMar 22, 2009
I like how he's on his design high horse when his portfolio sucks.
oceanseaMar 22, 2009
Despite being such a massive company, Google really do seem to be floundering on the design front for it's products other than search (it's great that search is minimalistic - well apart from that they added social search. Groan).Gmail, once a fantastic stripped down lightening fast web email client seems to be incorporating everything but the kitchen sink now - for example, do we use labels or do we use folders? Should the typical user use one or both? Google probably agonized over the decision to re-do the buttons at the top of each message, but UI-wise it's very confusing and we get a UI decision that Microsoft would probably be proud of. That was not a compliment.I've also been waiting for a grand UI that pulls together all of Google's main products - I'm still waiting. What we have is a few products (now they've killed a lot of the quite frankly, silly pet projects) loosely connected with eachother instead - as arguably, there should be - of a hub to switch between them all - I thought that iGoogle was going to be this, but whilst it's a dashboard of sorts, it's definitely not a hub yet.To round up, I agree with a lot of people commenting here - Google seem to be to web UIs what Microsoft are to software UIs - and no, that's not something to be proud of.Here's a hint: Engineers cannot and should not design UIs - let professional UI and web designers have the final say...
techsinMar 23, 2009
Too cool Sgyoung. and again, minimalism or not. We just don't need unwanted buttons, lots of colors, irrelevant options and even 1 second of delay because some darn .css file took time to load which is eye candy to my granny. Google understands this. They succeed.
drjgMar 29, 2009
NO1SE - some of us are no longer in the overcluttered playpen, some in fact discovered the beauty of simpler amusements due to a not overcrowded playroom - but stay in yours as long as you need. Google might be for grownups, though.
drjgMar 29, 2009
EdGasket - you arbitrarily decide which five shades to use, while someone else might win with another. If you are a painter free to sell your work it is one story and design for business used by billions is another. For that matter Money created wonderful spectrum with his varied portrayals of one topic, fascinating in the details. It is only being lazy that stops an artist from experimenting with a variety of choices possible in a design. And for that matter if five choices were enough why are fashion designers even existing - surely there have been more than five designs in fashion? Or would you exclude them from designers and artists too for convenience of your argument about testing only five shades of a chosen colour?
drjgMar 29, 2009
LilRabbitFooFoo - you can find another site to suit your taste and leave google for those that love google's simplicity. Incidentally, have you tried to play about with all the options google has with home page from tabs and content to themes? Far far from bland. You can in fact design your own google home page - almost. I am rather finicky and I have found several options very attractive, and have a number of tabs too with content, for my google home page.