Google Design is Google's official design site, with posts on its brand identity, Material Design, icons, fonts, and tools.
HN links it for Google's design announcements. Commenters disagree on Material, with some praising Android design and one calling its UX a catastrophe.
I expected more attention to detail for a project this big. They are using the new logos in a few places now. All suffer from various problems. The one on the Google Official Blog (http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/google-update.html) has hinting problems most noticeably on "l" symbol (zoomed version – http://i.imgur.com/1kRZB5o.png). The same with the logo on the Google Translate (https://translate.google.com/) and with the presented Google Logotype on the Google Design blog (https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-identity/, https://g-design.storage.googleapis.com/production/v5/assets/renditions/g-logo-360@2x.png). The black SVG logo at the bottom of the last page has some unkempt figures and a leftover line.
On a positive note, the logo image (http://googleblog.blogspot.ru/2015/09/google-update.html) is well optimized with Zopfli (https://github.com/google/zopfli). However, I don't see why the new logo is smaller (from here – https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-identity/). I could bring down the size of the previous one (http://i.imgur.com/lfmoqgP.png) to 8 174 bytes (originally 14 022 bytes) vs 13 804 bytes for the new one. Of course, SVG versions are both much smaller.
The 10-month investigation by the GSA's inspector general
found that 52 percent of 18F's work was unbillable and
included an internal project to change its logo by altering
its font, alignment and background color. In all, 727 staff
hours, or $140,104, were spent on developing the brand,
including that logo change.
It seems that the author is intentionally obfuscating this point and making it seem as if 52% of 18F's work was put towards "making the logos look hipper," which is likely not the case. While "developing the brand" includes logo work, in most cases, that is just a small part of it. Developing a UI design spec, similar to Google's Material Spec [0], would also fall under "developing the brand."
Perhaps someone from 18F can speak to whether developing the U.S. Web Design Standards [1] is part of this category because if so, I would argue that spending $140k (which is roughly 1-2 software engineer annual salaries) on such a project is certainly worthwhile since this spec is part of the foundation for many future projects.
[0] https://design.google.com/spec
[1] https://standards.usa.gov/
I think Android has surpassed iOS in terms of design and usability. I upgraded to a Android 5.0 recently (lightly modded by One Plus), and the design is really stunning. The icons have been redesigned to appear as though they they are made of actual flat material adding almost a hybrid 3d flat design that looks great. The colors are vibrant without being overwhelming. Messenger and Contacts applies a new color to your contacts which helps you keep in mind with whom you are speaking. All the Google apps exhibit similar colors and styles to add for consistency.
I'm not a designer and maybe its just personal preference, but I'm a long time Android user and this is the first time the stock Android has been pleasant to look at. I use other's iPhones and, despite the great display, the UI now appears rather dull in comparison.
https://design.google.com/
Rebranding, when done correctly, can be a great way to regroup and focus on what's important about your business. You really need to stop looking at it as just a new design, and look at what philosophy it exudes. This constant visual reminder of what the company's mission is resonates downward much better than a mission statement, and how clients/customers interact with you.
This is of course if your rebrand was a success, and that's a very very difficult task dependent on all sorts of internal factors, that even the largest companies get wrong (see Gap, Uber, Pepsi). Don't listen to me though:
https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-identity/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnv5iKB2hl4
Oh google has many pages:
- https://arvr.google.com/
- https://bughunters.google.com/
- https://design.google.com/
- https://opensource.google.com/
- https://code.google.com/
- https://ai.google.com/
- https://mapsplatform.google.com/
- https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/
- https://privacy.google.com/
- https://lens.google.com/
- http://labs.google.com/
- https://jigsaw.google.com/
- https://datastudio.google.com/
- https://tagmanager.google.com/
- https://script.google.com/
There are some more scraped by me https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
They actually give a reason why they changed it in the blog post. Saying that the old one was designed for desktops and the new one is meant to scale better (for things like watches and phones I'd guess).
Edit: to add from their design blog[0], the new logo can be sent to a client in 305 bytes of compressed SVG (vs 14,000 bytes for the old logo). So it helps with lower bandwidth. The design post also mentions scaling of the logo.
[0] https://design.google.com/articles/evolving-the-google-identity/