WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 46955618

(no title)

gmurphy | 21 days ago

When we designed Chrome, since minimalism was our thing and screens used to be small, A LOT of time was spent on the total vertical space - thin titlebar, slightly bigger tabstrip, and a large toolbar. Lots of discussion, lots of questions

Telling people the height ratios between them followed the golden ratio was a very convenient way to shortcut the bikeshedding and get to "aha, very nice"

The trick was it didn't follow the golden ratio at all because the golden ratio is not some magic number that leads to balance and peace - lighting, rounding, color, and visual strength all dramatically outweigh it

discuss

order

user____name|21 days ago

My favorite genre of graphic design is when you take a logo and work backwards to show the "very deeply thought about" construction, completely made up after the fact. The golden ratio is useful in that with a bit of fiddling you can fit pretty much anything to it. This is like catnip for "spiritual" types.

virgil_disgr4ce|21 days ago

Now I'm imagining an app that automatically back-engineers a 'golden ratio' analysis or similar bullshit explanation for you to save you the time and trouble of making it up yourself. Being able to give fussy clients an instant graphic design placebo would be super useful.

In a way it's anthropologically (and linguistically) interesting that such a bigram can gain this kind of status as a result of marketing, essentially. Probably having 'gold' in there helps. Maybe the app could have optional modes for completely new magic numbers:

- The Platinum Proportion - The Gilded Fraction - The Silver Symmetry - The Coveted Correspondence

redanddead|21 days ago

maybe the golden ratio was the friends we made along the way

Wowfunhappy|21 days ago

I loved the minimalism of early Chrome, thank you so much for your work on that!

I wish this was still a priority for modern Chrome. Just because screens are bigger now doesn’t mean I want to waste that space.

actionfromafar|16 days ago

Chrome is dominant now. Different position, different behaviour.

chrismorgan|21 days ago

Ah, explanations that are treated as justifications without actually justifying anything.

“Vertical rhythm” in website layout. Utter nonsense. Valuable in print layout (for adjacent columns or double-sided paper), completely useless in digital (unless you have side-by-side columns with headings or pictures mixed in, but this is seldom seen outside print, partly because the web doesn’t support it well).

“Modular scales” in choosing font sizes. Typically worse than utter nonsense, because you want heading levels to be distinctive, and modular scales will harm this by forcing lower heading levels to be too small.

Force all your app icons into a rounded square or squircle or circle, because consistency. No! Now you can’t find anything easily. Android was so much better before that nonsense started.

Monochrome icons deliberately designed to look the same. Now they’re unmemorable. Colour was a useful signal.

(This comment is generic; I’m not saying anything about LiftKit here, for or against.)

gmurphy|21 days ago

I agree with your criticism of design dogma - it drives me nuts too - people saying something bad is good because it follows the rules. But since I'm also responsible for the Android icon shape-change you talked about, let me waffle for a bit in case it helps provide a perspective on the other side of that decision:

I agree with that the non-uniform icons are easier to find, and that uniform shapes make it harder (I also agree that uniform colors are awful, but that was after my time so I have no stake in that).

However, usability is not about pure efficiency - a huge amount of it is approachability - people have to _want_ to use the UI. If they don't want to use it, no amount of pure-usability work will mean anything - it will just be "shitty computers" in their heads. In Android's case, the developer-provided weirdly shaped icons were a major sticking point - people would take one look at an Android homescreen with all kinds of mismatched splatters of icons, mentally lump it with Windows and Linux in the must-be-for-geeks bucket, and walk off to the Apple store.

It drove us nuts - in actual tests, people would often find Android easier and more efficient to use, but would still pick iPhone as the "easier" product, because that's the one that was inviting, that fit their style, that looked easy to use.

So we did a lot of work nudging Android to a place where real people would find it desirable, easy, and powerful - making really difficult tradeoffs - sometimes breaking expectations, sometimes sacrificing a little bit here and there to gain a lot somewhere else, sometimes just taking a chance.

It took a lot of effort from a lot of wonderful people, and it involved a stupidly large amount of arguing against "just copy iPhone" laziness and pressure (a major reason I left), but I am still deeply proud of what the team was able to do. We couldn't please everyone, but I think more people were pleased afterwards than before.

pjmlp|21 days ago

You only have to watch the WWDC videos from the designers regarding Liquid Glass, and appreciate how much "improved" the macOS with Tahoe experience feels like in practice.

Same applies to sessions on Fluent or Material designs, and how they end up on the respective OSes.

Squarex|21 days ago

What was the reasoning about not implementing vertical tabs much, much earlier? I use them now in the canary builds, but on 4k 32" screen it is not that critical as it was on the small 16:9 full hd screen. The vertical space used to be much scarcier than the horizontal.

gmurphy|20 days ago

When we started work on Chrome my favourite browser was a now-forgotten IE shell called iRider, which implemented tree-ish style tabs in a better way than anyone, and we did take multiple attempts at vertical tabs early on.

We didn't ship them because they were only a mitigation of the too-many-tabs problem, not a solution, and they didn't really fit our model of 'tabs are titlebars'. They were also never going to be default - most people did not have that many tabs, and we had a very strong opinion was that we shouldn't have configuration - it was better to very strongly execute on one vision we loved and risk losing people (but hope the quality would bring people along), than to execute and support multiple directions poorly.

The world has changed a lot since I last worked on Chrome ten years ago, so as an outsider I'm excited to see what the team currently attempting it can do.

gregoriol|21 days ago

Chrome is so much not a reference in design that we should take this take carefully

tshaddox|21 days ago

When it was new its design was a big draw (second to performance, of course).

Wowfunhappy|21 days ago

Are you confusing modern Google Chrome with early Google Chrome, or did you dislike early Google Chrome?

amadeuspagel|21 days ago

All other browser I've tried (firefox, vivaldi, edge, safari, atlas, many others) and all other programs with a tab-based UI I use (zed, vs code, sqlitebrowser) look worse.

xnx|21 days ago

What don't you like about Chrome design?

port11|20 days ago

Ironically many of the website’s examples look worse than what they compare against. Taste is personal, I guess.

Razengan|20 days ago

"lighting, rounding, color, and visual strength" along with "clarity, content-focused" etc. are used as hollow buzzwords just as much as "golden ratio"

The whole minimalism/flat movement from iOS 7 and Google's Material and Microsoft's Metro crap was frankly a lazy and weak copout, a give-up on trying to make nice looking UI that could also be functional.

Why is it that sci-fi has always had such beautiful UI since Star Trek but the real world is still so boring?