Newsfeed
06/26/2020
Celebrating Pride in Design
As Pride Month winds down, we’re keeping the celebration going by highlighting LGBTQ+ stories and communities to join in the months to come. At Google, the 2020 Pride Committee has committed to donating $2 million to organizations that work year-round to uplift and meet the needs of vulnerable LGBTQ+ communities; Read about the initiative, and get to know the global grantees. To shine light on the powerful history of the movement, we recommend beginning with an immersive tour of Stonewall Forever, a digital monument highlighting queer life before the riots (made in partnership with The LGBTQ+ Center). Familiarize yourself with leading activists, past and present; Netflix documentaries on trans representation and Marsha P. Johnson are good places to start. And walk through 6 moments in contemporary LGBTQ+ design history—from ‘40s queer zine culture to Monica Helms’ Transgender Pride flag in 1989. Or browse the pages of Queer x Design, which captures the signs, symbols, banners, posters and logos used by LGBT+ activists.Want to get more involved with the community today? Explore these groups supporting queer UXers working across design and technology: • Check out Queer Design Club’s robust chat space of almost 1,000 LGBTQ+ designers from around the world and the ever-expanding directory.• Join one of Out in Tech’s daily virtual events and see how the nonprofit creates opportunities for its 40k+ members, leveraging tech for social change.• Learn from Lesbians Who Tech, a cross-industry community of LGBTQ+ women, non-binary and trans individuals, and allies—Stacey Abrams, Elizabeth Warren, and Megan Rapinoe were some of their recent speakers!• AIGA NY and Queer Design Club are teaming up for an online conversation on the queer experience in design, discussing QDC’s first field-wide survey with vibrant LGBTQ+ creatives across disciplines.• Build skills and grow with TransTech, an incubator for LGBTQ+ professionals that focuses on economically empowering transgender and gender nonconforming individuals.• Listen in on June 30th as Queer Tech NYC spotlights work that’s been founded, coded, and developed by the LGBTQ+ community.• Join LGBTQ in Technology, a safe, confidential chat space with over 250 conversation channels, making sure no voice goes unheard.• Queer Tech Club is a monthly happy hour event for professionals in Chicago, now with virtual hangs you can join from anywhere! Their Slack community for LGBTQ+ folks and allies is a great additional resource.• The Trevor Project also offers resources to help allies be more supportive.Anything else you’d like to share? Give us a shout over at @googledesign. And Happy Pride!
06/22/2020
Designing for Equity
At Google Design, our goal is to support the future of design and technology for all. This involves introducing new voices and amplifying less-heard ones. Now, more than ever, the design community must not stay silent. We at Google Design stand in solidarity against racism and violence. Across Google, Sundar Pichai and Black leaders are collaborating on next steps towards change; Read Sundar’s letter on the company’s commitments. Here on the Google Design editorial team, we’re working to uproot bias in our own work by critically examining our role in driving equity through the narratives we share. We’re holding each other accountable with a collective curriculum and study group across our team.Below, we’ve gathered some of the strategies, resources, and organizations that are helping us improve our processes and ourselves. If you’re not sure where to start, we hope these tactics, and practitioners who are making moves towards equity can be helpful to some of you, too. Start here:• Hire talented individuals from the Blacks Who Design directory.• Diversify your feeds and follow the creatives featured on Revision Path Podcast.• Listen to Antionette Carroll, Founder of Creative Reaction Lab, share why she sees design as system building rather than object building, and adopt Equity-Centered Community Design into your practice.• Understand the role of shame amidst power dynamics in research in UX Researcher Vivianne Castillo’s talk: Ethics & Power.• Explore what it means to transform technology systems in the spirit of justice and equity with Timnit Gebru, Google research scientist and Co-Founder of Black in AI.• Identify the role you can play as an ally through design with Researcher Dimeji Onafuwa’s powerful talk from SPAN 2017 Pittsburgh.• Plug into conversations like Where are the Black Designers, which seeks to stir change in and out of the design industry.• Analyze cases of “discriminatory design” with Ruha Benjamin as she discusses the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, and tools for a socially-conscious approach to tech.• Listen to Benjamin Evans’ untraditional route to leading inclusive design thinking at Airbnb.• Get to know organizations that are working towards equity and support them: Code2040 mobilizes the largest racial equity community in tech, Black Girls CODE provides African-American youth with coding skills, Pursuit trains adults with the most needs and potential to advance in tech, and The Center for Urban Pedagogy joins designers, policymakers, and community advocates to demystify urban planning issues. • And for more learning, explore Theo Shure’s Race, Representation & UXR and Isabelle Yisak’s Incomplete List of Resources for the Equity-Centered Designer.Have something you’d like to add? Tweet us @googledesign.
04/07/2020
A remote dispatch: community resource list
Over the last few weeks, we’ve found new ways to work together, while apart. The Google Design team is currently spread across New York, working from makeshift home offices in Brooklyn, Queens, Westchester, and even a couple of upstate outposts. We’ve also found ways to actively not work, and unplug from our devices—if only for an hour or two. Between rambunctious children and pets, digital dance parties, home cooking, streaming documentaries, and book clubs, we’ve also found moments of gratitude and silence. Mainly, we’ve been encouraged by all the creative ways our community is showing up to support each other. It’s been uplifting to see the small hacks, care packages, collaborative initiatives, and extensive resources being shared to help us all stay informed, entertained, and connected. We hope you find them helpful, too.Have something you’d like to add? Tweet us at @googledesign. Take care, friends.Community resources:• Bon Appétit Test Kitchen is Cooking at Home (Bon Appétit)• bored.solutions• #clapbecausewecarenyc• CW&T on Instagram (CW&T)• Digital Wellbeing (Google)• The Eye on Design Guide to Self-Isolation for Designers and Creatives (AIGA Eye on Design)• Free Movie of the Week (Gary Hustwit)• Glitch for Remote Work (Glitch)• #HackToHelp (Google)• PFH—PARTY FROM HOME (@pfh_partyfromhome)• Quarantine Book Club • Remote Design Resources from the Community (Figma)• Remote work wiki (Notion)• Stay Home, Take Care (Girls’ Night In)• Working From Home: A Beginner's Guide (99u)• YouTube Learning (Google)
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Beneath the SurfaceGoogle Seed Studio shares the inspiration behind their latest creative directionEditorial -
More Human Ambiance in Ambient ComputingHow to make ambient computing work—for peopleOp-Ed -
Variable Fonts Are Here to StayAs variable fonts make their way into Google Fonts, learn what they are and their benefits for digital design–better compression for developers, greater expression for designers, and finer text typography for readers.Guide -
Here, There, and EverywhereFrom basements to highrises, folding tables to gaming chairs, familial officemates to curious cat colleagues, six Googlers share their makeshift, out-of-office workstationsEditorial -
Absolutely FABHow the Floating Action Button became a Material Design iconEditorial“That thinking started to evolve towards the Floating Action Button—or FAB—which would be the most important action within an interface pulled out from the action bar. It could be a hallmark of the app, a hallmark of the brand, and very easy for the user to know they would always be doing the right thing.” -
Simulating IntelligenceTechniques for prototyping machine learning systems across products and featuresGuideBy building quick, real-feeling (and often wholly simulated) versions of products and features, teams can be nimble, explore various directions, fail early, and pivot repeatedly—all before going too far through the entire costly, messy machine learning development process.
Featured Collection
Type & Typography
Explore typographic culture and discover fonts for your next project with this collection of case studies, technical updates, and articles curated by the Google Fonts team.
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Three Designers Walk Into a Virtual Conversation…Gathering a trio of creatives at the leading edge of their fields, we explore how industrial design, AR, and VR are moving design forward at Google.Editorial -
Contrary to Popular BeliefA personal tale of managing your career by molding your characterOp-Ed -
Towards Resilient SystemsDesigners and technologists look to the natural world to envision more resilient futuresEditorial“A biodiverse ecology, one with many different species, is more resilient to change and disturbance. Coral reefs, which occupy less than 1 percent of the ocean floor but support 25 percent of marine life, are believed by scientists to have the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem on the planet.” -
Rehearsing the FutureFrom moonshot thinking to the power of listening, members of Google’s speculative design teams discuss how they’re rehearsing for what’s next.Editorial -
Is it Good Design? Well, yeah.We ask people who design and build Google products what they consider to be good design.EditorialWe asked the people who design and build Google products what they consider to be good design. -
2020 Material Design AwardsNominate your product for a 2020 Material Design Award and help us showcase the flexibility and capability of the Material Design systemAnnouncement
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YouTube Sans: The Making of a TypefaceHow YouTube created a tailor-made font that doubles as a brand ambassadorCase study -
Design Notes: AI-Mediated ArtBJ Best on collaborating with computers to create poetry, music, and visual artProfile -
A New Interaction LanguageFive years of research went into developing Soli, a miniature radar chip that detects motion and understands nonverbal cues. The team behind the project details what it took to design a truly intuitive interface, and why this is only the beginning.EditorialWe believe that designers, in particular, can bring both creativity and a humanistic perspective to the process by helping to frame a new technology and discover its intrinsic properties. -
Talk to Me: The Evolution of EmojiGifs, memes, and emoji have quickly become a lingua franca. But what do they say about our collective need to be heard?Op-Ed"When we retouch an existing emoji, details matter. If emoji serve to underscore the emotional tone of a text message, showing the wrong breed of animal isn’t a trifle of a mistake, it’s a problem."