> Update: A person familiar with Google's branding tells The Verge that this is not a replacement for the company's traditional logo. Instead, the flatter design is used in instances where the beveled logo may not display well — such as on printed banners or other corporate use cases. The logo in question has been pulled from where it first appeared previously in Chrome for Android, signaling that the company quickly realized its mistake. Suffice it to say, the Google logo you know and love isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Why is flat "modern"? I don't understand it. I'm not criticizing it, I think it looks neat, but I just can't understand why, after all this time we struggled to make shadows, rounded corners etc, everything is just flat.
There was a time where most people didn't know how to operate a computer. We had to pull all the stops out to make computer use possible or easier for them - skeumorphism is one of the things that came out of that. We hoped that by emulating real-world objects, both in detail (see: iCal) or in more abstract terms (see: "3D" buttons).
Whether or not this ever really helped usability is a matter of debate.
In any case though, basically everyone knows how to use the computer and the web now. The general UI elements and their rules - links, buttons, sliders, etc, are all known to just about everyone. At this point since we've trained everyone, we get to drop some of the frills around the UI without suffering a substantial drop in usability.
That and it's just the style. Why are cars today more beveled and sharper-edged than cars of the 90s? Whatever happened to the big hair of the 80s?
I'm 47, been using computers since high school, and find flat a disaster. I'm in Firefox right now. The forward/back buttons take slightly different shades of gray depending on whether they are currently disabled or not. I endlessly find myself speculatively clicking on them to see if they work or not. Sure, somebody will respond that the difference is clear to them, but that does not obviate my data point.
Further, I often find myself completely unable to discern which tab is for the page I'm on. If you use chrome, the tab in the foreground lays on top of the other tabs, so it is clearer. Firefox - a slightly different shade again.
Are there more tabs than are visible? Again, this is denoted by a slightly different shade of gray. This probably works great for 20 somethings with great eyesight. It is very problematic if your eyesight or monitor is not so good, if your windows color settings are not the norm, and so on.
As for cars, they are shaped this way because of wind tunnel data. Data and utility matter, design is not just all about fashion.
It seems to me that your complaint is not so much with flat design as it is with insufficient contrast between active/selected items and other items. That can be a problem with non-flat UIs as well.
In any case, your point about the 20-somethings is a good one. Large portions of the web are usable only with difficulty for people with poor eyesight, or lack of experience with high-stimulation environments, or attention problems, or sensory-processing issues, etc. We see articles about making things usable by blind people, but very little about the much larger population of people who can't handle low contrast, overly busy pages, or tiny text.
I don't quite get why you are complaining about Firefox. I'm on the Aurora series, and using the default theme; the buttons are colourful when enabled, and grey when disabled. No matter what series you're on, Firefox has a plethora of themes to pick from, including some that give it Chrome-like tabs.
This is the same story I've heard everywhere, but have there actually been usability studies to show that flat buttons are somehow more user-friendly than 3D buttons?
It seems like most people's gripes are with the fact that skeuomorphism supposedly led to designs like Apple's Podcast and Find My Friends apps. I'd argue, though, that those app designs didn't suck because of skeuomorphism; they sucked because they were overdone to the point of not relating to reality at all anymore. No one uses tape decks anymore, so clearly that was a paradigm that fell flat completely, and Find My Friends, instead of going for a radar look or something similar, decided to go for an overly-puffy address book-type thing that just looked awful and cluttered.
My problem is now that no button is safe without being criticized for looking clickable, or in other words, exactly like every other div and text field on the page.
I don't see an argument that flat is more user-friendly - just that it's not less user-friendly for people who are familiar with GUIs, and so now we (as UI designers/programmers) can use them without actual drops in usability.
I agree with "because it can afford to be now," but in a different sense. It's fashionable to be fat when food is scarce, and thin when food is abundant. It's fashionable to be pale-skinned when the lower-class works outdoors, and tanned when they work in offices. And it's fashionable to be shiny and realistic when it's a hard effect to implement, and flat when shiny realism is one library-call away.
> At this point since we've trained everyone, we get to drop some of the frills around the UI without suffering a substantial drop in usability.
Do you have any data to back up your opinion? My anecdotal experience with unsophisticated users is that Google's new flat design has been a usability disaster. People who had been capable users of the old gmail design had difficulty finding the same functionality in the new design.
There's a strong tendency for people who live and breath technology to think that it is "intuitive" for everyone. It's not, and such an attitude merely reflects a lack of empathy for people who don't find computer use natural and easy.
Yes, I agree with this. Google touts that they 'dogfood' their designs. Well, have you been on campus? It's like the Valley of Clones. I have no doubt a sea of 20 something, somewhat bright people find flat gmail and the like very usable. 60, glasses, and can't tell if a button press worked or not because there is no visible detent and such? Not so much.
>In any case though, basically everyone knows how to use the computer and the web now. The general UI elements and their rules - links, buttons, sliders, etc, are all known to just about everyone. At this point since we've trained everyone, we get to drop some of the frills around the UI without suffering a substantial drop in usability.
Chiming in as well with, this isn't exactly true. Just the other day in a DMV I watched a woman really struggle with a touch screen because she didn't realize that two of the "flat" buttons, were options she could click, she thought they were just information.
I'm a big fan of the flat look, but I do see how it can be confusing for some people.
In design the word "modern" has a specific meaning. Modernism is a movement, a school of thought that emerged in the early 20th century with Bauhaus and designers such as Mies van der Rohe who famously said "Less is more". It's a rejection of ornamentation and unnecessary elements. It embraces honesty for the medium and materials, and the idea that "form follows function".
The reason that flat design is modern is because it rejects the use of shadows, bevels, glossy textures because these are decorations that attempt to make a digital interface look like something it is not (i.e. real objects in the real world).
Just to tag along - I was surprised when I first saw early 1920s typographic/graphic design (esp. book covers) just how closely the newer "flat" UIs resemble that period's style.
One could make the argument that Forstall's iOS was post-modern. The choice of using real-word textures such as leather and notepaper were not just about helping novice computer users, they also seemed like an aesthetic choice, decorative features along the lines of Robert Venturi's architecture. I think Forstall might have agreed with him that "less is a bore".
It "modern" because we've spent all this time struggling to make shadows, rounded corners etc. to the extent that now everyone can do it reasonably well, so to be different and fresh and stand out you now need to do something else.
Give it a year or two, and you'll see the the trends shift yet again.
Here in HN we can elevate ourselves above these looped fashion styles.
A way to do that is to find something that is old but not old-fashioned, or something that is new but not modernist.
Examples abund in the domains of cars, music, book and I'd prefer not to drop names. But I can't seem to be able to find one single not-old-nor-new design in the domain of websites. Maybe HN is (or it is an old-baby)? Google could have been that: a specific flavor that is not outdated or trendy, but with this flat thing the last thread of hope has gone.
Oh, one thing that is old-fashioned and very modern at the same time: the Terminal! Lovely friend, you was designed for 1bit/s teletypes, and you still the fastest and most reliable friend in all what I do to my computer. Hope you never dies.
Shameless hook: I consider douban.com, where I work (beware: Chinese), to be somewhat not modernist nor old-fashioned, in a way.
All those effects still have a place in a "flat" design. They're just more subtle and you actually have to go look for them instead of being distracted by them. Their main purpose is to create affordance for UI elements.
For example, the new Google has a very subtle gradient from light to dark; so while you say it's "flat" there is actually simulated light being cast from a third dimension. This helps it stand out on (appear on top of) a uniform background.
Because of the Hawthorne Effect. Change for the sake of change. You can't get complacent now. We need the continued product refresh cycles and relevancy of new trends.
What looks modern is very often a cycle between "because we have the technology to do it" and "because we have the technology to not do it anymore".
We arrived at a point where putting more shadows, glitter, transparency effects and particles is no longer hard, so it no longer looks modern. The only solution to go forward is to remove all that fluff in a statement saying: "Our tech is so good we don't even need to show it anymore".
The same applies to building materials in design. 40 Years ago, concrete was all the craze and the material of the future. We would use that shit on everything. Today, a building made only of concrete looks passé, but I'm sure it will come back with a vengeance once we find out how to make it lighter/color-changing/glow-in-the-dark or something stupid like this.
In general, "minimalist" design seems to be quite popular these days (not just in technology) and "flat" is pretty minimal. Maybe that's something to do with it?
I'm not defending or attacking, but I think the idea is that:
Computer UI designs in the past tried to make the user more comfortable by mimicing the textured, three dimensional environment that humans exist in. Look around; every object you interact with outside the computer is shadowy, rounded, bevelled and textured.
The current thinking is that computer UI should not need those real-world cues in order for users to feel at home in the digital environment.
Because shadows and corners are unneeded. We needed to root the web experience into something familiar. So buttons had to be big round and push-able and voluminous.
The same way it is with current weird looking save and telephone icons (floppy and classic phone).
Currently there are kids clicking icon of a 3 1/2 inch floppy that haven't been born the last time one of those was used outside the corporate and government depths.
The old flat had border lines (usually black lines between light-colored backgrounds). The new flat uses differences between background colors to mark the same sorts of boundaries. I think this makes enough difference that it's worth considering them distinct.
Whether or not Google is about to flatten their logo, it's worth noting that Yahoo just un-flattened theirs. It's also not inconceivable that one of the reasons Yahoo did this was to appear more Google-like.
Hm, I doubt this is a new logo. The bevelled logo is the one used in digital media. The flat logo is the one used in print and has been in use for a while.
This is funny
HN headline: google is changing its logo
Source Headline: Is google changing its logo?
Source conclusion: No, google is not changing its logo.
It's funny how tastes shift. This whole "flat" look that's currently in would have looked babyish in the tech space 10+ years ago. And so it goes with bevels, shadows, and all the rest.. looks silly to us now but was de rigeur back then! :-)
Of course, things will continue to shift and today's trendiest looks will seem ridiculous in 2023..
2023? Visual Studio switched to largely B&W icons in its 2012 release. Some of the websites that have been linked from HN as prime examples of flat design also used the B&W icon motif (I don't recall which ones specifically though).
The old logo, warts and all is a classic by now. It's actually surprisingly timeless. In one word it's playful. I wouldn't change it just to follow the latest design trend.
The actual Ars Technica headline begins (now, at least; perhaps it's changed) "Is Google changing its logo?", and recent updates to the article suggest that, as per Betteridge, the answer is "no, probably not".
It’s not a new logo. It’s not even a different logo: the glyph shapes are exactly the same in both versions, it just has different shading for when it needs to be displayed small.
Apple has been known to try different shading and color for its logo, but that doesn’t mean that whenever they do so, they’ve adopted a new logo.
If you look closely, it's not flat. There's a very thin bevel.
It's symptomatic to me of Google's inability to make up their mind in the design department: UI different across products, UX disaster when they introduce discrepancies between products, not able to decide whether their logo is flat or bevel....
Really, Google is good at doing nerd stuff, but they should just outsource everything regarding design.
If you look closely at all flat design, it's not flat. There's almost always a very thin bevel.
There are several reasons for this:
1. it attempts to address the issue of flat UIs being absolute shite for UX.
2. it looks more interesting on a high definition screen.
3. it adds a finishing touch that sets it slightly apart from plain text.
This probably more of a reflection on the person/people at the top.
Apple did everything one way: Steve Jobs' way. Since his departure, I have seen less unified focus from Apple.
Google's MO almost from the beginning has been sort of the opposite--to try everything at least once and have fun doing it. This spills over into some of their design philosophies too, I would think.
Yahoo's change was more the CEO deciding that she can redo it in a weekend. I would think any change from Google would go through a UX/UI design team and a ton of redundant meetings... not sure which is worse.
"Googol" is a word invented by a child. "Google" is a homophone of this word. How to do you give the logo a less-childish treatment while maintaining a name that is also childish?
The title of this article, as posted to Hacker News, is "Google is changing its logo." The title of the article linked to by this post is "Is Google revamping its logo?".
I'm not sure that taking the shadows out of their logo is actually changing it. Google uses flat logos on t-shirts and elsewhere I'm sure. Imagine a black t-shirt with a white google logo on it. Flattening a logo is something you might do in the context of usage, so I just don't know why flatening it for their default (which matches a lot of their existing design anyway), is seen as a big deal.
http://deployment.googleapps.com/Home/user-resources/google-...
But if they're using it in Android apps it may point to more flattenification in KitKat/future releases. However, that doesn't seem to be the case:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/9/4710634/redesigned-google-l...
> Update: A person familiar with Google's branding tells The Verge that this is not a replacement for the company's traditional logo. Instead, the flatter design is used in instances where the beveled logo may not display well — such as on printed banners or other corporate use cases. The logo in question has been pulled from where it first appeared previously in Chrome for Android, signaling that the company quickly realized its mistake. Suffice it to say, the Google logo you know and love isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Case closed.