10 ms·

Google Fonts: more than a trillion served

80 points by robinhouston 13y ago

eps 13y ago
Trillion visits logged. Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.
- untog 13y ago
  Yep, like everything, it's a trade off. In return you get a very robust platform and free fonts.
  - pandringa 13y ago
    In return for what? Google's not profiting off of Google Fonts, because I'm sure that whatever data they get from it could be collected by their other services.
    - ars_technician 13y ago
      Logged visits to sites they would otherwise not get. Font request+referrer is useful information.
      - Silhouette 13y ago
        If you're concerned about your own privacy in this respect, you can install a plug-in for most browsers that will prevent a real Referer being sent with your requests. Google will still serve you the web font, they just won't know which page you were viewing at the time. (I'm not making any comment on Google's general strategy or how many people would actually understand that they might wish to protect their privacy in this way, just pointing out that it can be done.)
  - J_Darnley 13y ago
    My computer or more accurately the operating system came with dozens of fonts, maybe hundreds. Why can't you use one of those?
    - jonknee 13y ago
      Because most of them suck?
      - SquareWheel 13y ago
        And more than that, each operating system has a different set of fonts.
    - xnxn 13y ago
      Imagine how ridiculous the web would look today if content creators had to restrict the images they used to some common subset of those preinstalled on clients' operating systems. Would you condemn web typography to the use of "web safe fonts" forever?
      - J_Darnley 13y ago
        Yes. I do indeed condemn creators to use a font which renders correctly and I also condemn them to use a size which is legible.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Isn't it the job of the user agent to have options to override the choices of a website? Otherwise, the subset of "fonts everybody is sure to have" is just too small. Why not let everybody have websites look how they want them to look? I'm kinda sad this vision gets so little attention, that instead we all try to push our vision on our visitors. Even if the web turns app platform.. just like we have configurable desktop managers, browser could still let everybody customize how websites look - if only websites could stop with the "story telling" and "experiences", and concentrated on utility and information. We're too addicted too shiny for our own good already.
  - gress 13y ago
    A trade off implies people understand what Google is doing, which they don't because it's secret.
- unknownian 13y ago
  Is it against the TOS to download the font and host it on your own server? It's very simple to do even though they don't give instructions.
  - jonknee 13y ago
    No: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts
  - putlake 13y ago
    I am in the middle of a redesign and the new design uses Droid Serif. I wanted to avoid an extra HTTP request and bundle the WOFF font file in the CSS (using data URIs). The other option was to host the font on my server to avoid the DNS lookup for yet another domain. (CSS is in the critical path for page loads). Both are easy to do but I abandoned both of those ideas after watching this interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqesm0euf9M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqesm0euf9M Google Fonts makes a lot of optimizations that are platform-specific. e.g. serve smaller files to Macs, larger files to Windows. It is not worth doing all this yourself.
    - markdown 13y ago
      Don't put anything more than 10KB into a CSS file as a data URI.
      - Silhouette 13y ago
        Where does this limit come from? IE8 can handle up to 32KB[1], and more recent versions of all major browsers appear to have much higher limits. IE7 and below didn't support data: anyway. [1] See http://caniuse.com/datauri http://caniuse.com/datauri, and confirmed by Microsoft's own technical documentation.
        markdown 13y ago
        Oh I didn't mean that to be a browser limitation, but that it is generally a good idea performance wise.
- afsina 13y ago
  So you are claiming that reason of very existence of Google Fonts is to collect not-so-useful-and-easily-could-be-collected-by-other-services-of-Google data? Can we stop the whole Google bashing it is getting ridiculous.
  - RexRollman 13y ago
    They are an advertising company, which pretty much makes them data collection company. Its completely fair to question their motivations.
    - jfb 13y ago
      I personally think that Google does things like this because they can; they are not under money pressure (yet?) to have to really try to extract maximum value from every bit served or watt consumed, and can thus spend energy on initiatives like this that improve the web as a platform -- it's at best an indirect benefit, but fits their overall corporate strategy. And, it's cool. I have my doubts about Google, but I don't have a problem giving them the benefit of the doubt here.
    - garthdog 13y ago
      Make the web better for all forms of content so that people don't resort to proprietary tech?
    - ChrisArchitect 13y ago
      sure, advertising. but the goal here is to make the web more user friendly and useful for people, through better looking design/readability etc. That helps us all, and if then in turn they can keep the ad platforms alive, good on them I say.
    - DannyBee 13y ago
      The motivations, as far as i know, are written on the about page: "A web with web fonts is more beautiful, readable, accessible and open. " Google Fonts makes it quick and easy for everyone to use web fonts, including professional designers and developers. We believe that everyone should be able to bring quality typography to their web pages and applications." If you have some actual evidence that the last part isn't true, and that it's really some big scheme to "log visits", what is it, exactly? FWIW - my dealings with the team, which mostly involve reviewing occasional open source font contracts, makes me believe they really are just crazy about making web typography good. But i'm really interested in whatever sinister theories people have. I mean, you know what they say about people who like "Signika Negative".
- jonknee 13y ago
  Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself (they're open source): https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts > You can download the fonts to use them for your mockups, in your documents or to host them on your own server. Google Fonts exists because it's in Google's best interest if everything is online. Having freely available high-quality fonts is a [small] way to help move that along. Update: No cookies are set by Google either, they're just doing analytics by the user agent sent. The actual font files have 1 year expires headers on them as well, so cookies would be of limited use.
  - loceng 13y ago
    Didn't realize this - thanks. :)
  - mehrdada 13y ago
    Also, without accessible web fonts, developers will have to use images containing rendered texts to get text pretty on their web pages, which is not so easy to index for a search engine.
  - gress 13y ago
    Except for the fact that people don't download and serve them themselves.
  - eps 13y ago
    > Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself. Yeah, you try that. It's a single format that you need to convert yourself to produce woffs, eots and other variations needed for the actual self-hosted deployment, and no matter how you convert, they will never come out looking the same as Google's native versions. This "go ahead, host it yourself" is disingenious and manipulative at best.
    - notJim 13y ago
      Here you go: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator. Upload a font and get back a kit with everything you need.
- byjove 13y ago
  Only reason huh? nothing to do with prettifying the web and making developers happy, because that doesn't benefit Google in any way...
  - RexRollman 13y ago
    Not directly it doesn't.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - coldtea 13y ago
    If they cared about that they'd keep Reader open.
    - mburns 13y ago
      That's a a ridiculous stretch.
    - byjove 13y ago
      I don't see the connection there. Anyway it would appear that the universe has survived that ordeal.
- darkhorn 13y ago
  Google Fonts, Google Public DNS, Google Analytics, Google+ like gadgets, Google Adsense, Google CDN for jQuery etc, Google services like Search and Gmail, Embedded Youtube videos, Google Chrome word correction sugesstions and safe sites checks, Firefox safe page checks, probably many things within Android backend. Probably they know with 99.9999999% accuracy how many online web users are out there.
- nkuttler 13y ago
  Considering that browsers have caches this isn't a huuuge issue.
afsina 13y ago
Interesting. It is a rare thing to see that Google shares information about the Browser and OS stats.
- jonknee 13y ago
  And that they broke out iOS (even iPhone/iPad separately), but not Android (I suspect it's in the oddly high Linux category).
  - gress 13y ago
    They didn't break out android because it would contradict the usage numbers they would like people to believe.
    - DannyBee 13y ago
      Yes, i'm sure that's the reason ....</s> It would actually be impressive if google was such a single cohesive whole
      - gress 13y ago
        If Google is not a single cohesive whole, how can you speak for it?
        DannyBee 13y ago
        Certain people have certain authority to talk about certain things. I set policy around open source and open source licensing. I can speak officially to open source issues for Google (though at least here, i'm not unless I specifically say I am) This does not mean it's a cohesive whole however. In particular, a small team Of 3-4 people in the middle of a random non-android product area is not going to have the android team breathing down their neck asking them to "not break down numbers" or whatever the parent thinks happened here.
        13y ago
recuter 13y ago
This shows MSIE at ~18% split between IE10 and IE8 with a bit of an edge to the former. These are the most optimistic stats I've ever seen. Still, a trillion pageviews is nothing to sneeze at. I guess for normal none-corporate browsing OldIE has really truly actually fallen below 10% and can finally be ignored?
- afsina 13y ago
  I think these stats are more accurate than many others (I am looking at you Net Applications). However, Most of the popular large sites (Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, e-bay and Chinese stuff etc.) do not use Google Fonts so IE stats are skewed.
  - recuter 13y ago
    For all intents and purposes those are outliers that can be ignored anyway unless you happen to be a Top25 website yourself.
- magicalist 13y ago
  Where do you see the IE version split? I only see the browser type analytics, not split by version.
  - yohui 13y ago
    There are two pie charts under "Views by platform": "Browsers" and "Browser Versions". Under versions, both "MSIE 10.0" and "MSIE 8.0" are listed. Though assuming the two pie charts are based on the same data, I'm not sure how specific versions of Chrome and Mobile Safari have greater shares of the "Browser Versions" pie than all of their versions have in the combined "Browsers" chart.
makmanalp 13y ago
If you ever get lost in the tons of fonts offered, check out this curated list that I absolutely adore: http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/ http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/ https://github.com/ubuwaits/beautiful-web-type https://github.com/ubuwaits/beautiful-web-type
- loceng 13y ago
  There are more like these. If I can find find them in my bookmarks, I'll paste them here.
  - notJim 13y ago
    Please look harder, I want to see!
- ChrisArchitect 13y ago
  yeah this was a big one for me too
chj 13y ago
Serif fonts are going out of business? Only one in the top 10 is Droid Serif, still dropping.
- rkuykendall-com 13y ago
  The page we're on, the page linked, my browser and OS are all 100% sans-serif. I wouldn't say going out of business, I don't think they will ever disappear, but definitely taking a back-seat role.
timdorr 13y ago
A lot of this has to do with Twenty Twelve being the default theme for WordPress, which used Open Sans as its default font. Many people I've seen either use that theme or some derivative of it (myself included).
npunt 13y ago
I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet -- Windows Chrome, the #1 Google Fonts browser, pretty much sucks at rendering Google Fonts. Which means you probably don't want to use Google Fonts yet. An outstanding issue [1] for the past few years has been that it can't antialias fonts correctly. The results are sometimes just so-so, and sometimes horrible, depending on what version of Windows you're running and what settings you have enabled. Small fixes have dropped but the fundamental issue remains. When I first added Google Fonts to my site, I got word from several readers saying text was illegible. Thats when I discovered that tons of other designers had the same issue and it was Chrome's fault (search 'chrome windows fonts' and enjoy). I went back to Helvetica/Arial and every day this issue persists a little part of the designer in me dies. When a company espouses a newfound interest in design [2] [3], but lets a major design issue on the largest platform for their products just sit there (visibly) unaddressed, you get a sense they don't have the right people in the right places to get stuff done yet. Don't get me wrong, I love Google Fonts, it's a fantastic service for the design community. And Google has been building a lot of great design tools [4] that help push the web forward. Just.. close the loop on fonts already. [1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 [2] http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the-redesign http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the-redesign [3] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-ho... [4] https://www.google.com/webdesigner/ https://www.google.com/webdesigner/
- visarga 13y ago
  > When a company espouses a newfound interest in design, but lets a major design issue on the largest platform for their products just sit there (visibly) unaddressed, you get a sense they don't have the right people in the right places to get stuff done yet. Same for Google Maps. I live in Romania and we have had high-rez satellite and maps of our country, including street view, but for 7+ years we haven't had GPS locations of individual house numbers. Android being the most popular phone and Google Maps the most popular GPS/maps app in Romania, not to be able to locate a house on a long street makes it almost useless. GMaps simply points to the middle point of the street - if it is miles long, then you might be a long way from your actual destination. Why can't a multi-billion dollar company get their act together and finish their work? Even small GPS companies sell products that can look up houses on the street, but not Google. Could it be that it is too expensive even for them, or that Romania is worthless for them to spend time to finish the job? I raised the issue on reddit, send feedback directly to them and at one time I even met a Google Maps employee and described our frustration with the Romanian Maps to him directly, but nothing gets done. It's like we fell off the Google Map™ into "forgotten land". And it's not a minor issue, it's like the most central thing a GPS does.

80 points by robinhouston 13y ago

eps 13y ago

Trillion visits logged. Just remember, kids, that it's the only reason Google Fonts exist.

untog 13y ago
Yep, like everything, it's a trade off. In return you get a very robust platform and free fonts.
- pandringa 13y ago
  In return for what? Google's not profiting off of Google Fonts, because I'm sure that whatever data they get from it could be collected by their other services.
  - ars_technician 13y ago
    Logged visits to sites they would otherwise not get. Font request+referrer is useful information.
    - Silhouette 13y ago
      If you're concerned about your own privacy in this respect, you can install a plug-in for most browsers that will prevent a real Referer being sent with your requests. Google will still serve you the web font, they just won't know which page you were viewing at the time. (I'm not making any comment on Google's general strategy or how many people would actually understand that they might wish to protect their privacy in this way, just pointing out that it can be done.)
- J_Darnley 13y ago
  My computer or more accurately the operating system came with dozens of fonts, maybe hundreds. Why can't you use one of those?
  - jonknee 13y ago
    Because most of them suck?
    - SquareWheel 13y ago
      And more than that, each operating system has a different set of fonts.
  - xnxn 13y ago
    Imagine how ridiculous the web would look today if content creators had to restrict the images they used to some common subset of those preinstalled on clients' operating systems. Would you condemn web typography to the use of "web safe fonts" forever?
    - J_Darnley 13y ago
      Yes. I do indeed condemn creators to use a font which renders correctly and I also condemn them to use a size which is legible.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Isn't it the job of the user agent to have options to override the choices of a website? Otherwise, the subset of "fonts everybody is sure to have" is just too small. Why not let everybody have websites look how they want them to look? I'm kinda sad this vision gets so little attention, that instead we all try to push our vision on our visitors. Even if the web turns app platform.. just like we have configurable desktop managers, browser could still let everybody customize how websites look - if only websites could stop with the "story telling" and "experiences", and concentrated on utility and information. We're too addicted too shiny for our own good already.
- gress 13y ago
  A trade off implies people understand what Google is doing, which they don't because it's secret.
unknownian 13y ago
Is it against the TOS to download the font and host it on your own server? It's very simple to do even though they don't give instructions.
- jonknee 13y ago
  No: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts
- putlake 13y ago
  I am in the middle of a redesign and the new design uses Droid Serif. I wanted to avoid an extra HTTP request and bundle the WOFF font file in the CSS (using data URIs). The other option was to host the font on my server to avoid the DNS lookup for yet another domain. (CSS is in the critical path for page loads). Both are easy to do but I abandoned both of those ideas after watching this interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqesm0euf9M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqesm0euf9M Google Fonts makes a lot of optimizations that are platform-specific. e.g. serve smaller files to Macs, larger files to Windows. It is not worth doing all this yourself.
  - markdown 13y ago
    Don't put anything more than 10KB into a CSS file as a data URI.
    - Silhouette 13y ago
      Where does this limit come from? IE8 can handle up to 32KB[1], and more recent versions of all major browsers appear to have much higher limits. IE7 and below didn't support data: anyway. [1] See http://caniuse.com/datauri http://caniuse.com/datauri, and confirmed by Microsoft's own technical documentation.
      - markdown 13y ago
        Oh I didn't mean that to be a browser limitation, but that it is generally a good idea performance wise.
afsina 13y ago
So you are claiming that reason of very existence of Google Fonts is to collect not-so-useful-and-easily-could-be-collected-by-other-services-of-Google data? Can we stop the whole Google bashing it is getting ridiculous.
- RexRollman 13y ago
  They are an advertising company, which pretty much makes them data collection company. Its completely fair to question their motivations.
  - jfb 13y ago
    I personally think that Google does things like this because they can; they are not under money pressure (yet?) to have to really try to extract maximum value from every bit served or watt consumed, and can thus spend energy on initiatives like this that improve the web as a platform -- it's at best an indirect benefit, but fits their overall corporate strategy. And, it's cool. I have my doubts about Google, but I don't have a problem giving them the benefit of the doubt here.
  - garthdog 13y ago
    Make the web better for all forms of content so that people don't resort to proprietary tech?
  - ChrisArchitect 13y ago
    sure, advertising. but the goal here is to make the web more user friendly and useful for people, through better looking design/readability etc. That helps us all, and if then in turn they can keep the ad platforms alive, good on them I say.
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    The motivations, as far as i know, are written on the about page: "A web with web fonts is more beautiful, readable, accessible and open. " Google Fonts makes it quick and easy for everyone to use web fonts, including professional designers and developers. We believe that everyone should be able to bring quality typography to their web pages and applications." If you have some actual evidence that the last part isn't true, and that it's really some big scheme to "log visits", what is it, exactly? FWIW - my dealings with the team, which mostly involve reviewing occasional open source font contracts, makes me believe they really are just crazy about making web typography good. But i'm really interested in whatever sinister theories people have. I mean, you know what they say about people who like "Signika Negative".
jonknee 13y ago
Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself (they're open source): https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#Download_Fonts > You can download the fonts to use them for your mockups, in your documents or to host them on your own server. Google Fonts exists because it's in Google's best interest if everything is online. Having freely available high-quality fonts is a [small] way to help move that along. Update: No cookies are set by Google either, they're just doing analytics by the user agent sent. The actual font files have 1 year expires headers on them as well, so cookies would be of limited use.
- loceng 13y ago
  Didn't realize this - thanks. :)
- mehrdada 13y ago
  Also, without accessible web fonts, developers will have to use images containing rendered texts to get text pretty on their web pages, which is not so easy to index for a search engine.
- gress 13y ago
  Except for the fact that people don't download and serve them themselves.
- eps 13y ago
  > Except the part where they allow you to download them and serve yourself. Yeah, you try that. It's a single format that you need to convert yourself to produce woffs, eots and other variations needed for the actual self-hosted deployment, and no matter how you convert, they will never come out looking the same as Google's native versions. This "go ahead, host it yourself" is disingenious and manipulative at best.
  - notJim 13y ago
    Here you go: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator. Upload a font and get back a kit with everything you need.
byjove 13y ago
Only reason huh? nothing to do with prettifying the web and making developers happy, because that doesn't benefit Google in any way...
- RexRollman 13y ago
  Not directly it doesn't.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- coldtea 13y ago
  If they cared about that they'd keep Reader open.
  - mburns 13y ago
    That's a a ridiculous stretch.
  - byjove 13y ago
    I don't see the connection there. Anyway it would appear that the universe has survived that ordeal.
darkhorn 13y ago
Google Fonts, Google Public DNS, Google Analytics, Google+ like gadgets, Google Adsense, Google CDN for jQuery etc, Google services like Search and Gmail, Embedded Youtube videos, Google Chrome word correction sugesstions and safe sites checks, Firefox safe page checks, probably many things within Android backend. Probably they know with 99.9999999% accuracy how many online web users are out there.
nkuttler 13y ago
Considering that browsers have caches this isn't a huuuge issue.

afsina 13y ago

Interesting. It is a rare thing to see that Google shares information about the Browser and OS stats.

jonknee 13y ago
And that they broke out iOS (even iPhone/iPad separately), but not Android (I suspect it's in the oddly high Linux category).
- gress 13y ago
  They didn't break out android because it would contradict the usage numbers they would like people to believe.
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    Yes, i'm sure that's the reason ....</s> It would actually be impressive if google was such a single cohesive whole
    - gress 13y ago
      If Google is not a single cohesive whole, how can you speak for it?
      - DannyBee 13y ago
        Certain people have certain authority to talk about certain things. I set policy around open source and open source licensing. I can speak officially to open source issues for Google (though at least here, i'm not unless I specifically say I am) This does not mean it's a cohesive whole however. In particular, a small team Of 3-4 people in the middle of a random non-android product area is not going to have the android team breathing down their neck asking them to "not break down numbers" or whatever the parent thinks happened here.
        13y ago

recuter 13y ago

This shows MSIE at ~18% split between IE10 and IE8 with a bit of an edge to the former. These are the most optimistic stats I've ever seen. Still, a trillion pageviews is nothing to sneeze at. I guess for normal none-corporate browsing OldIE has really truly actually fallen below 10% and can finally be ignored?

afsina 13y ago
I think these stats are more accurate than many others (I am looking at you Net Applications). However, Most of the popular large sites (Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, e-bay and Chinese stuff etc.) do not use Google Fonts so IE stats are skewed.
- recuter 13y ago
  For all intents and purposes those are outliers that can be ignored anyway unless you happen to be a Top25 website yourself.
magicalist 13y ago
Where do you see the IE version split? I only see the browser type analytics, not split by version.
- yohui 13y ago
  There are two pie charts under "Views by platform": "Browsers" and "Browser Versions". Under versions, both "MSIE 10.0" and "MSIE 8.0" are listed. Though assuming the two pie charts are based on the same data, I'm not sure how specific versions of Chrome and Mobile Safari have greater shares of the "Browser Versions" pie than all of their versions have in the combined "Browsers" chart.

makmanalp 13y ago

If you ever get lost in the tons of fonts offered, check out this curated list that I absolutely adore: http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/ http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/ https://github.com/ubuwaits/beautiful-web-type https://github.com/ubuwaits/beautiful-web-type

loceng 13y ago
There are more like these. If I can find find them in my bookmarks, I'll paste them here.
- notJim 13y ago
  Please look harder, I want to see!
ChrisArchitect 13y ago
yeah this was a big one for me too

chj 13y ago

Serif fonts are going out of business? Only one in the top 10 is Droid Serif, still dropping.

rkuykendall-com 13y ago
The page we're on, the page linked, my browser and OS are all 100% sans-serif. I wouldn't say going out of business, I don't think they will ever disappear, but definitely taking a back-seat role.

timdorr 13y ago

A lot of this has to do with Twenty Twelve being the default theme for WordPress, which used Open Sans as its default font. Many people I've seen either use that theme or some derivative of it (myself included).

npunt 13y ago

I'm surprised nobody's pointed this out yet -- Windows Chrome, the #1 Google Fonts browser, pretty much sucks at rendering Google Fonts. Which means you probably don't want to use Google Fonts yet. An outstanding issue [1] for the past few years has been that it can't antialias fonts correctly. The results are sometimes just so-so, and sometimes horrible, depending on what version of Windows you're running and what settings you have enabled. Small fixes have dropped but the fundamental issue remains. When I first added Google Fonts to my site, I got word from several readers saying text was illegible. Thats when I discovered that tons of other designers had the same issue and it was Chrome's fault (search 'chrome windows fonts' and enjoy). I went back to Helvetica/Arial and every day this issue persists a little part of the designer in me dies. When a company espouses a newfound interest in design [2] [3], but lets a major design issue on the largest platform for their products just sit there (visibly) unaddressed, you get a sense they don't have the right people in the right places to get stuff done yet. Don't get me wrong, I love Google Fonts, it's a fantastic service for the design community. And Google has been building a lot of great design tools [4] that help push the web forward. Just.. close the loop on fonts already. [1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137692 [2] http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the-redesign http://www.fastcodesign.com/3016268/google-the-redesign [3] http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-how-larry-page-engineered-beautiful-revolution http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/24/3904134/google-redesign-ho... [4] https://www.google.com/webdesigner/ https://www.google.com/webdesigner/

visarga 13y ago
> When a company espouses a newfound interest in design, but lets a major design issue on the largest platform for their products just sit there (visibly) unaddressed, you get a sense they don't have the right people in the right places to get stuff done yet. Same for Google Maps. I live in Romania and we have had high-rez satellite and maps of our country, including street view, but for 7+ years we haven't had GPS locations of individual house numbers. Android being the most popular phone and Google Maps the most popular GPS/maps app in Romania, not to be able to locate a house on a long street makes it almost useless. GMaps simply points to the middle point of the street - if it is miles long, then you might be a long way from your actual destination. Why can't a multi-billion dollar company get their act together and finish their work? Even small GPS companies sell products that can look up houses on the street, but not Google. Could it be that it is too expensive even for them, or that Romania is worthless for them to spend time to finish the job? I raised the issue on reddit, send feedback directly to them and at one time I even met a Google Maps employee and described our frustration with the Romanian Maps to him directly, but nothing gets done. It's like we fell off the Google Map™ into "forgotten land". And it's not a minor issue, it's like the most central thing a GPS does.