a little slice of geek

Gmail And Their Recent Design Changes

Gmail is fantastic, in fact I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the best, if not THE best web-mail service available to date. The features are plentiful, the space is obscene (i can fint more in my inbox than i can on the laptop i have next me) and it looks fantastic, nice, minimalistic, sleek and unobtrusive…

That was of course until tonight, 22:44 to be exact, when I visited my inbox to check up on a few auctions. All I can think of is that they must have had the “new-guy” roll out the recent design changes. For a start blocks of colour that contrast with the background is never a good way to turn. Removing line spacing to fit more on a page is also not a good move when your target is simplicity and minimalistic-ness (thats not a word, dont google it…)

In a blind stupour I manage to click the link to the themes and settings page. Only to find a barrage of other colour schemes to choose from, each more gaudy and Web 1.0-ish than the last… For the love of all that is holy in designer-land, don’t mix red and blue primary colours in a theme!!

Thankfully google had the sense to create a “Older Version” button to revert back to the tried and tested Gmail design… I click it, somethings not quite right. In fact two things arent as they were before. The line spacing is significantly smaller between items in the inbox, making it harder to read and more confusing to just glance at. The second thing is that read messages are no long un-bolded and greyed-out, they are simply un-bolded, meaning even read messages are still solid black text. The only difference between them and new messages are that new ones are bold… which isnt a ver significant difference…!!!

So an open memo to google (who I know reads this blog every day, they even subscribe to the RSS), change it back, changing things for the sake of poorly thought out design is not a valid reason to change something. I’m fairly sure £500,000 of those billions you’ve got can pay for a good designer, even if its just for this one task.

Sort it out!