To design its new icons, Google cut them all out of paper first, to get a sense of how they should be shadowed and shaded
For a very long time, Google didn’t put time or effort into making its products look beautiful. Instead, it prioritized speedy, accurate results to hold users’ attention.
Instead of aesthetics, Google cared about data. When its first designer left for Twitter in 2009, he wrote a strongly worded blog post about how he was sick of Google’s design philosophy which “lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”
“When we brought up design at Google, people used to scoff,” John Wiley, a Google designer told Fast Company’s Cliff Kuang. “It made it hard for us to hire great design talent because it didn’t seem like we had the full measure of respect for design.”
All that has finally changed. Kuang’s piece looks at the evolution of “material” design — an overhauled design interface aesthetic Google introduced with Android Lollipop last year that’s sleek and brightly colored. User experience is important and Larry Page told employees that Google would now care about making products look pretty.
Google software engineer Joseph Smarr wrote in a Google+ post that the company’s focus on design was “one of the biggest and most important changes I’ve witnessed inside Google in my 5+ years there.”
Linking to the Fast Company piece, he continued, “I’ve personally watched everyone mentioned in this article —especially my good friend Brett Lider — go from being frustrated outsiders when I joined to firmly in the driver’s seat now.”
Kuang writes that, with material design and its new unified aesthetic philosophy, Google has even surpassed Apple when it comes to attention to detail……..
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Image: Google