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Google Android

Google Video Shows All-White Redesigns For Gmail, Google Photos, and More (arstechnica.com) 105

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: This year, Google is pushing out a major revamp to its Material Design guidelines. The new design language is slowly creeping across Google's portfolio, and so far we've seen big changes for Gmail.com, early builds of Chrome, and for Android P. The Android side of things has so far only been the base operating system, but now a new Google design video has surfaced that shows off new designs for Gmail, Google Photos, Google Trips, and Google Drive.

[...] The Gmail screens strip the app of its trademark red UI elements and give us a white bottom bar and white background. The phone inbox shows attached documents and even has large thumbnails for images. The message screen appears to show attachments on a horizontal scrolling carousel, which looks a lot like the horizontally scrolling news articles in the Google Feed. This screen again places the important controls down at the bottom of the screen, where a bottom bar houses the usual "Mark as Read," "Delete," "Archive," and "Reply All" buttons. We even get to see the compose screen for a second, which shows previous replies above your compose field.
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Google Video Shows All-White Redesigns For Gmail, Google Photos, and More More

Google Video Shows All-White Redesigns For Gmail, Google Photos, and More

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  • Light-grey text on white?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hazem ( 472289 ) on Monday July 23, 2018 @05:47PM (#56997472) Journal

    What is this horrible fascination with light grey text on white backgrounds?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Art skills ie like to show their GUI work every few years.
      Recall NeXT, Mosaic, web-safe colors. Type that was black.
      The change could be for display, quality (lcd), a mobile phone? A push to natural colors?
    • Guess it helps drive people to chrome addons that prevent webpages from burning out their retinas. Pretty happy with TLV so far, if not a little quirky. Still, would be very nice if more of these blindingly white websites would give a dark option.

    • Original Mac called, wants its look back (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday July 23, 2018 @08:20PM (#56998022) Journal

      What is this horrible fascination with light grey text on white backgrounds?

      It started out with the horrible fascination with the "flat" style whereby it was hard to tell buttons from boxes etc. It was hard to use [slashdot.org], but art trumped* function.

      But they were not satisfied whacking shadows and shading, they had to whack colors also. At this pace, we'll go back to monochrome uni-spaced character-mode UI's. Keep your ASCII art; it may get you a promotion from a young PHB who won't realize it's from 1982. "Wow, this is so modern and stylish. Good job! And can I have a copy of that 'visi calc' software you showed me? It's totally cray!"

      After all, I've seen disco come back twice in my lifetime. UI fads seem in the same category as clothing and music fads. Oh right, it's not "UI" but "UX" now. Experience this!:

      Git off my flat light-grey lawn! (drought made such fashionable)

      * "T" word not intended to be connected with you-know-who.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What is this horrible fascination with light grey text on white backgrounds?

      Honestly, it's just yet another symptom in the down slope to even shittier interfaces designed by morons where everything in the world is a tablet, phone, or webpage.

      Everything from Windows to pretty much most native apps are suffering from this. Huge chunks of whitespace around things, unused space where they just don't put content, or dumbing down interfaces for teenagers with smart phones.

      It's especially frustrating to be sittin

    • My first "large" (meaning > 80x25 characters) computer screen used black and grey on white. That was in 1985. (SparcStation, not Mac) So here we are, a little > 30 years later, and we're sending you Back...to the Past!

      (To be honest, you said grey on white, not black and grey on white. And you're right; on the old email design, there was a boldish/blackish font and a greyish font, and I think they were used to distinguish whether you'd read a particular message or not. Beats me how you're supposed

  • Don't get me started ...
    All white? The rich old white man approach? .... insert various political references ...

  • that everything will have the colour #FFFFFF, which means everything will be invisible.

    This reminds me of the Douglas Adams novel "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" when an electric monk got stuck because he believed everything was pink and therefore everything was indistinguishable from everything else, so he got stuck because he couldn't 'see' any obstacles, until he stopped believing it.

    • It called â Snowblindâ(TM). It occurs when the background is white, foreground is a few grayscale shades off-white and the screen, book or map is also within the same grayscale range.

      Driving this occurs not only in whiteout snow conditions. It also happens in fog, cloud filled conditions in mountainous terrain and night time driving where inversions fill-in lower altitudes.

      You develop blindness driving, then look down at you map or white phone depiction of a route and itâ(TM)s blind to you. Y

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      everything will have the colour #FFFFFF...

      That's the sound I started making when I first saw the design.

  • Anyone surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CharlesAKAChuck ( 1157011 ) on Monday July 23, 2018 @06:25PM (#56997660)

    It's some sort of plot by Google to get people to quit using their services, I think.

    Google Finance - used to be really good, loads of information, very useful. Now, it's a whole lot of white space with not a lot else. No need to visit that page any more.

    Google News - used to be really good, loads of information, very useful. Now, it's a whole lot of white space with not a lot else. No need to visit that page any more.

    Google home page - well okay, that one should be a lot of white space and a search box, I'll give them that one.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • This is what happens when you move from providing a useful product to people with lots of options that are easy to configure. To providing a "tailored user experience" which tells you what they want you to hear, while hiding those useful options that were once easy to configure.

    • My guess is that the "new guys" are not competent enough to make an interface that responds to useful settings (like the old guys), so their response is to remove all these options that they are not good enough to implement. See for example the case of Skype: Version 7 had several configurable options to meet a wide range of users, while the version 8 have virtually nothing and force users to use the same pattern they like it or not.

    • Google home page - well okay, that one should be a lot of white space and a search box, I'll give them that one.

      I prefer it with a lot of dark space and a search box. Thankfully, there are solutions for this. Imperfect ones, but better than the alternative.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I do like that they have moved the menu/search button to the bottom, where it's easily reachable one-handed.

  • Gmail app redesign shows even less information than before. Years ago gmail app displayed about dozen emails on one screen. During the last redesign they limited it to 6-7 emails. This white redesign shows 3 (and a half) emails. This smells like a ploy to make people stop using it.

  • I asked a friend if it was any good? (Score:3)

    by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @03:01AM (#56999080) Journal

    He said it was all-white. I thought he had a lisp.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      He said it was all-white. I thought he had a lisp.

      Rolling Sthones: "Ith all white now, in fact ith a gath!"

      (This is after Barry Kripke joined the band)

  • obHitchhikersGuide (Score:3)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Tuesday July 24, 2018 @06:55AM (#56999648) Journal
    "It's so ... white!" he said. "Like, white buttons and text on a white background. It's so white that light just seems to fall out of it!"
  • Or might it be because the GUI people have to justify their paychecks? How long has it been since the GUI problem, with the type of hardware generally used, has been solved? 15 or 20 years?

    • Or might it be because the GUI people have to justify their paychecks? How long has it been since the GUI problem, with the type of hardware generally used, has been solved? 15 or 20 years?

      I think this is a factor in a lot of fields. Change for change's sake.

      For example, we have to reinvent grade school education all the time. After all, the tried and true methods won't get anybody their PhD with "original research".

  • All these designers who think white backgrounds are a good idea should be forced to be oncall where they get paged every night at 2 or 3am and are forced to stare into a screen that has the brightness of a thousand suns so they can understand the pain I go through every time I have to do the same, which is most nights. And then maybe they will understand just how painful those white screens are when your eyes are adjusted to the dark and how once they adjust to the 8 million lumens of light you won't be ge
  • Once you go Black, you ....are happy the text is white and you're saving battery power. DHUH
  • This is getting worse and worse. I am going to be trying Zoho. Seen that pop up on this site a few times as recommendations.
    I have held off trying to get a different email service just because of ALL the stuff attached to the GMail one.

    My Google account is pretty much going to be for YouTube to unblock videos with bad words and the Play Store.

    Unless there is a good replacement for that y'all can recommend.

  • "The goggles do nothing!"

    Everyone is going dark, even Youtube. I'm glad Google is doing something different but this is really straining my eyes.

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