over 5 years ago from Jan Zheng, UXer. Coder. Pretends to be an adult.
What's up with the new Google Mobile redesign, with its over-eager use of rounded corners, borders, and shadows? Seems it's going against their Material Design rules?
design systems evolve over time. Google at first was against bottom navbars and now they are documented on material design guidelines. Just because it's not on their manual, doesn't mean they can't change it.
Does this truly feel like an evolution? Their use of shadows is much more of a departure than an evolution.
Particularly considering how essential it was to Material to use shadows to convey different distances of UI vs. how this new design seems to use the exact same shadow everywhere, regardless of the layering. I mean, this design is now only using shadows to separate containers from backgrounds instead of white cards on gray backgrounds, so using shadows well is more important than ever.
Visual design is as much about fashion as it is about usability. The more accustomed you become to an aesthetic, the less positive your response becomes. To make a product feel fresh, designers have to use update the aesthetics on a regular basis.
Google promoted Material design as a kind of eternal philosophy, but that didn't stop the aesthetic from starting to feel old.
Well in this case it seems they made a lateral move in terms of design trends at the COST of usability. There isn't a single usability-positive decision I can see here, it's all compromise for fashionability and yet it doesn't even feel particularly new. It feels like a poor attempt to ape Apple as for some reason people seem to consider Apple's not-at-all-groundbreaking design changes in iOS11 (all of these trends were already all over dribbble and other apps) as the bar for "modern design." It seems totally thoughtless.
I agree, I think it's pretty weak design. Material Design was much stronger when it was first announced. Google has never been all that great at fashion.
Yeah, they aren't following their own visual design system at all. All the rounded corners and drop shadows are greater than 2dp on my device. It's not even tasteful, it just looks... well... you get the idea.
Imagine they just made it because of the iPhone X (and yeah… of course the Samsung S8 and wait…the Pixel´s rounded edges). #BringingRoundedCornersBack
ha I guess so. all the borders and corners are more distracting to me. It's like every couple years designers flip flop on what constitutes "good design" huh
Are the embedded images in this post supposed to be visible? I can't see them in multiple browsers.
Similarly, Chrome 62 for Mac took the liberty of auto applying a border-radius of 4px to all button tags across the internet that don't explicitly have a border-radius of 0. They're pushing hard for the rounded edge!
It definitely appears to violate their material rules regarding "cards", which presumably means it's an entirely different system.
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