Fantastic article by The Verge: "Something strange and remarkable started happening at Google immediately after Larry Page took full control as CEO in 2011: it started designing good-looking apps. [...] We went to Google looking for the person responsible for the new design direction, but the strange answer we got is that such a person doesn't exist. Instead, thanks to a vision laid out by a small team of Google designers, each product team is finding its way to a consistent and forward-looking design language thanks to a surprising process. They're talking to each other." I think Google's recent complete design transformation is one of the most remarkable shifts this industry has seen post-iPhone. I think the importance and possible ramifications of this shift are
best captured by Tom Dale:
Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.
Member since:
2005-08-26
I miss the Eric Schmidt days when Google's innovation was mainly on the web and based around standards and alliances. When Page took the reigns they started killing anything geeky or weird. Android would never come out of today's Google.
In the products that they have lost interest in like Books and Reader the redesign is so minuscule that it is basically just a color scheme change. Maybe the new color scheme looks better, but the old blue on white color scheme represented the simplicity of hypertext.