“We have world-class designers across key areas… There’s alignment around shared values and approaches but diversity of thought and opinion.”
— Sundar Pichai

When Google was incorporated in 1998, it was synonymous with technology and search engines. But design? Not so much. Today, Google is Fast Company’s 2018 Design Company of the Year. Clearly, a lot has changed over the last two decades. In a new interview with Sundar Pichai, our CEO discusses Google’s design evolution, challenges, and legacy—revealing how we landed the first Fast Company award recognizing high-quality, ambitious design work in an organization.

Read more over at Fast Company

Japanese fonts are both complex and very large—spanning well over ten thousand codepoints across four writing systems. This poses a unique challenge when it comes to the web, since downloading a Japanese font as a single “block” would make page load unacceptably slow. Google Fonts' innovative delivery system circumvents this problem by splitting the large fonts into roughly 100 “slices” based on an analysis of online language patterns. This intelligent approach was first used earlier this year for Korean fonts, and is now extended to support Japanese text with six web fonts for designers and developers. 

Want the latest fonts first? Join the Google Fonts Early Access Program

This year, our annual design conference is heading to Helsinki. Join 250 makers and technologists for a a day of thought-provoking talks, hands-on workshops, and experiential sessions in Finland’s capital city. We’re thrilled to host world-renowned speakers and Finnish designers working at the intersection of AI, art, and design for a single day of diverse programming. Registration is now open, please visit design.google/span2018 to learn more and follow #SPAN18 for updates on the speaker lineup (and more) in the days ahead.

A design system only comes to life when it’s used to create meaningful experiences. The annual Material Design Awards celebrate these experiences, showcasing best-in-class designs from our talented community.

Are you working on a product that exemplifies Material Design? Nominate yourself or your team for a 2018 Material Design Award and help us highlight what brings the Material Design system to life. This year’s categories for nomination: Expression, Experience, Adaptation, and Innovation. We’re looking for products that push the boundaries of Material Design and incorporate its expressive capabilities to create brilliant, meaningful experiences, no matter the platform. Start by filling out an entry form—and if you need some inspiration, take a look at the 2015, 2016, and 2017 winners.

The deadline for nominations is August 31, 2018 and Material Design Award winners will be announced on Google Design in October.

This time around we're digging into all things Material Design, including the new customization features and tools announced in May—like Material Theming, Gallery, and the Material Theme Editor. Need something to peruse by the pool? Check out this edition’s playlist of design videos from Google I/O, advice on how to make a teachable machine, and collection of 5 cool things to put on your radar this summer, curated by a Palo Alto-based UX designer.

Got Material Design questions? We’ve got answers. Tune in for our next #AskMaterial Twitter Chat on Wednesday, June 27 from 12:00–1:30 PM PDT, to ask Material Design experts about anything (and everything) from Material Theming to design tools and implementation. Team members from Material Design, Google Design, Design Relations, and Material Engineering will be on hand to answer your questions on the latest Material release.

“We have a responsibility to create things that are focused on the human experience, things that are centered.” — Yasmine Evjen

Today we’re launching Centered, a new video series focused on human-centered design. Travel the world with host and Google Design Advocate Yasmine Evjen, to explore the intersection of design, product, and people. In the premiere episode, Yasmine follows the International Rescue Committee and volunteers from Google.org in Amman, Jordan as they redesign an app that helps Syrian refugees move from surviving to thriving—a particularly apt subject for World Refugee Day. The series will criss-cross the globe as Yasmine talks to designers, researchers, and engineers, while exploring the impact and importance of a human-centered design process.

Subscribe: yt.be/centered

In addition to the Material updates unveiled at Google I/O, Material Design also has a brand new website complete with a redesigned UI, expanded guidelines, more developer resources, and lots of handy, built-in features. Pop on over and try out on of our favorites—the redline viewer breaks down the anatomy of a design to give you everything from padding measurements to type sizes, icons, and the components used in the build. You can also generate your own tonal palette with the color section’s design tool, and find ready-to-download themed icon sets. Enjoy!

Visit Material.io

Looking for a little design inspo? We’re here to help. Our latest Medium roundup is chock-full of inspirational articles and advice: Discover the 12 best “design” books that aren’t explicitly about design; Tips for designing like a visionary; How to create something that doesn’t exist yet; Why design is all about making meaning.

Go down the rabbit hole in the latest edition of the Google Design newsletter—featuring articles, videos, and resources from our premier article collections, in addition to highlights from recent podcast episodes, 5 Things to Love Right Now, and more.

Explore how user experience design has crossed over into other cultural realms, in this series of design talks hosted at Google, and curated by New Museum Deputy Director Karen Wong. Watch as musician and artist David Byrne, architects Florian Idenburg, Lauren Johnson, and Ryan Day, work to better understand the concepts of user-as-audience, user-as-participant, and user-as-client. All three talks in the series are now available to view in our YouTube playlist–enjoy.

Watch the Design Talks playlist

Can’t get enough of Google Design? Now you can have our latest and greatest delivered directly to your inbox each Friday. The Google Design Download is our new email-only digest of design stories, tweets, and tools—with a delightful free download in every dispatch. From great design writing to cool digital wallpapers and practical podcasts, sign up to get our selection of weekly treats.

Subscribe to the Google Design Download

Identifying the right problem is crucial for any successful Design Sprint. This one-day, intensive workshop will give you all the necessary tools for finding effective problems, framing them as actionable challenges, and engaging your team to work towards a common purpose. Best suited for folks who plan on running their own Design Sprints, this workshop will help you gain stakeholder support and set the stage for success.

Learn more about New Haircut and register for the problem framing workshop

FontStruct—the world’s most popular type design app—just added support for the SIL Open Font License (OFL), creating a pathway for users to submit their designs to the Google Fonts catalogue. FontStruct’s modular system makes it easy to create new letterforms from a readymade toolkit of geometric shapes. By choosing the OFL, users open up their FontStruct designs for others to use, modify, improve, and distribute.

Learn more about type design and Google Fonts

The Google Fonts catalog now includes five Korean web fonts for designers and developers working in the nation’s Hangul writing system. Because Hangul calls for a large number of unique characters, font files are often incredibly large and page loads can be slow as a result. The Google Fonts team used machine learning to develop a more nimble system to deliver Korean fonts to web users on the fly. Instead of sending the whole file, the Google Fonts API chooses a certain ‘slice,’ based on language patterns found across the Korean web. These new fonts will plug into your website just as easily as any other Google Font, and even more Korean fonts are scheduled for release in the coming months. 

Visit the new Google Fonts Korean directory

Need a little perspective? Broaden your horizons with our collection of design talks. Get new insights on everything from Artificial Intelligence UX, to emotion-sensing interfaces, and VR innovations from industry leaders like futurist Pamela Pavliscak, designer Senongo Akpem, and UX designers Jess Holbrook and Josh Lovejoy.

Read a new essay by Catherine Courage, VP of User Experience, on the top five lessons learned after a year at Google. Her Medium article focuses on building and maintaining a healthy UX culture by cultivating passion, speed, and an ethical compass. Co-author of the book Understanding Your Users, Catherine is an expert on UX and design thinking, with an interest in brands, product design, information experience, and innovation.

Follow Catherine on Medium

Developers! Amp up your design game with this roundup of our most popular Medium articles: Learn how to take advantage of Android O’s new color management capabilities; Try using browser extensions to build prototypes; Supercharge your design meetings with these decision-making tactics; Learn how to use Android Studio’s new downloadable fonts feature.

Follow our publication at medium.com/google-design to find even more insights and tips from designers at Google.

Before the clock runs out on 2017, catch up on all our latest news and insights in the Year-End Edition of the Google Design newsletter. This installment includes highlights from our globe-spanning SPAN conference series, an intro to our new editorial collections (for type lovers, UXers, and forward-thinking creatives), a teaser for something we’re launching in the new year—and another delightful round of “5 Things to Love Right Now” from a visual designer working on the Jigsaw team.

Subscribe here to get the Google Design Newsletter delivered directly to your inbox.

Learn how to build an app with distinctive typography using Android Studio’s new downloadable fonts feature. Every developer knows that design plays a major role in user experience—it’s often a critical factor in the success or failure of your app. Still, there’s always the temptation to use default fonts, whether to push ahead with a release, to sidestep the expense of purchasing fonts, or just to avoid the seemingly arcane art of type selection. In this tutorial, Google Fonts Tech Lead Rod Sheeter shows native developers how newly available features make it easy to customize typography, reduce the size of APK files, and harness the full power of the Google Fonts catalog. 

Read the Android Developer’s Guide to Better Typography

Google’s newly minted AIY Projects group has just unveiled their latest tool: The AIY Vision Kit. The kit essentially uses the same computer vision capabilities as self-driving cars and the Clips camera, but for DIY design projects. Connecting the Vision Kit with a Raspberry Pi and camera lets you (or your kids) run built-in neural network models, so the system can process live video. Which means it can do things like recognize your cat in the backyard, send an alert when your car leaves the driveway, or take a photo of the squirrel at your bird feeder.

Learn more about the AIY Vision Kit on the Keyword.

Poly is an online library that lets designers and developers browse, find, and download 3D objects and scenes. To make the process of finding the right 3D assets even faster and more flexible, the team just launched the new Poly API, which lets you interact directly with Poly to search, download, and import creative commons 3D assets dynamically across desktop, mobile, virtual reality, and augmented reality.

We’re celebrating World Usability Day by kicking off a new global event series! Join us and Google Developers Experts for talks and trainings on visual design, design sprints, interaction design, front end development, and user research throughout November and December in ten different locations around the world. If you’re a developer, designer, or entrepreneur in Mexico City, come to our first event this Friday, November 10. We hope to see you there!

Learn more about upcoming events, and follow the conversation #gdewud2017

Are you a designer? The Design Census needs your voice. Take 15 minutes to answer 38 questions and contribute to one of the industry’s best resources for understanding the complex economic, social, and cultural factors shaping design practice today. Created by Google and AIGA, the annual Design Census aims to move beyond basic salary conversations and collect information to empower the design community to take charge of its professional development and achieve greater happiness through insight. The data is open to all.

Take the Design Census

Do you know the secret history of AI? How sensors change perception? How data collection can change the world? Get a taste of the engaging conversations that took place at SPAN Pittsburgh—from reimagining human-machine communication to critical considerations of data collection, artistic storytelling, and the role of social design. This year’s Pittsburgh event connected the ideas of inspiring creators including ‘Robot Tamer’ Madeline Gannon, data wiz Mimi Onuoha, artist Golan Levin, social designer Dimeji Onafuwa, and many more.

Watch our highlights from SPAN Pittsburgh
Learn more about SPAN 2017 

Want to reach your next billion users? We have a growing set of UX guides and tools to help you get started, authored by Google’s Next Billion Users team. Learn about the research and design methods behind Google’s global products, while honing your own approach to designing new products for people in emerging markets. Articles and guides cover  methods for organizing immersion trips, conducting UX surveys, designing great apps, and more. Additional articles and resources are slated for release in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Visit the UX for the Next Billion Users collection

Fuel your creativity with the seventh edition of our Google Design newsletter. Focused on #MaterialDesign, this installment covers the latest Material updates, case studies, and winners of the 2017 Material Design Awards—not to mention the launch of our newest podcast, Design Notes, another round of "5 Things to Love Right Now," and much more.

The latest updates to the Material Design Guidelines include a new section on offline states—to help you better customize your app for users without internet access. Plus updated guidance for Android Oreo on creating adaptive icons and categorizing notifications into channels, and a section on how settings are grouped, titled, and styled. Find out more by visiting the "What's new" section of the Material Design Guidelines.

Read more about the design behind each of these outstanding apps: goo.gl/6wrKMs

We’re inviting everyone with an internet connection to engage with the creative energy and ideas of this year’s SPAN Pittsburgh conference. Not only are we livestreaming two days of talks, panels, and conversations, but for the first time we’re giving livestream-watchers a free downloadable SPAN Livestream Viewing Kit to make your viewing experience even better. The kit includes information about how to watch the SPAN livestream, tips for hosting your own viewing party, a printable speaker schedule, plus details on our exclusive (shhhh!) livestream swag giveaway.

Download the SPAN 2017 Livestream Viewing Kit and tune in on Sep 14-15.

Stay tuned to @googledesign for #SPAN17 updates!

Check out this roundup of our newest and most popular Medium articles: Learn how UX designers can navigate the new practices of human-centered machine learning (HCML) to make better AI and ML products; Try out new UX motion design tools Sketch2AE and Inspector Spacetime; Read about how one Googler designs UX for developers; Find out how to design new adaptive icons for Android O; Get an inside look at how Google designers adapt Material guidelines for Inbox and Keep.

Robots are creatures, not things. What is the verb of architecture? Does data have a blind spot? These are just some of the ideas we'll be exploring at SPAN Pittsburgh, Sep 14-15. Sign up now for a spot—we have a limited number of tickets available through open registration.

SPAN Pittsburgh will feature the work of local thinkers and makers, plus presentations by Madeline Gannon, Golan Levin, Molly Wright Steenson, Luis von Ahn, and many more. Visit g.co/span17 for more information and stay tuned to #SPAN17 for the latest.

We're also pleased to announce additional SPAN events this fall in Newcastle-Gateshead, UK, and Mexico City, MX. We'll be updating the SPAN website with additional information and speakers in the coming weeks.

Dive into Surface magazine's technology issue with an in-depth cover story on our VP of Design Matias Duarte. Interviewed at the Google offices in Mountain View, California, Matias talks about his path to UX, the wildly popular computer game he designed in college, and his steadfast commitment to design. We've gathered a few of our favorite moments below:  

On his approach to design at Google
"We're treating the process of design as a design problem. I want the design process to be really transparent. I want it to be backed by science, and I want it to be continually reflected upon."

On studying art and computer science at the same time
"I'd be doing studio hours, painting on these massive canvases, and then head over to the computer lab and be working on a ray tracer."

On his childhood
"I grew up naturally becoming aware of politics and the sociological ramifications of everything, from the design of houses to the design of economic policy."

Read the full cover story over at Surface. 

This week, the Google Brain team unveiled PAIR: the People + AI Research Initiative. The program is devoted to advancing the research and design of people-centric AI systems. A pillar of the research is Human-Centered Machine Learning, which combines design thinking with AI to open up new opportunities for applications, and new ways to help users.

Subscribe here to get the Google Design Newsletter delivered directly to your inbox.

Are you working on a product that exemplifies Material Design? Or an app that brings #MaterialDesign to life? We’re now accepting Material Design Award nominations…from you! Nominate yourself or your team for a 2017 Material Design Award and help us highlight the best designs from our talented community of designers, developers, and makers.

Categories for nomination include: brand expressiveness, interaction design, platform adaptiveness, and innovation. We’re looking for products that push the boundaries of Material Design to create brilliant, meaningful experiences, no matter the platform. If your product fits that description, start by filling out a nomination form—and if you need some inspiration, read all about the winning apps from 2015 and 2016.

The deadline for nominations is July 27, 2017 and Material Design Award winners will be announced on Google Design in September.

Not sure which navigation patterns are right for your Android app? Having trouble organizing destinations for your nav drawer? Want to know how bottom nav and tab bars can work together to better guide your users?

Join members of the Material Design, Design Relations, and Material UX Engineering teams on Tuesday, July 11 from 10:00–11:30AM PDT for the first ever #AskMaterial session on the complex topic of navigation. We’ll be on hand to answer all your nav-related questions—so don’t be shy. Follow along or submit your queries to @materialdesign ahead of time using #AskMaterial.

If you need to brush up on your Android navigation knowledge before Tuesday, check out this handy primer on Android Navigation. See you there!

We've got a fresh, new look! Now it's easier than ever to find the articles, news, and tools you love right from the homepage. Take a few minutes to explore our new story collections for in-depth insights on everything from branding to SPAN, and visit our new and improved jobs page to find out what it's really like to work with us. We've got a few more surprises in store, so sign up for our newsletter and keep an eye on design.google.

Check out a handful of our latest and greatest Medium articles: Learn how Google redesigned over 2,000 emoji to make them more expressive than ever; Watch the top design talks from I/O 2017 in our Definitive Design Guide; Get an inside look at Seoul’s vibrant design scene from four of the city’s top studios; Find out what happens when you lock 35 developers and designers in a room for a 3-day design sprint; Read a UX designer’s top tips and tools for getting started in the industry.

Making Material just got easier. The new Material Components site features a library of components and expanded documentation that let you build easily for Android, iOS, and the web using open-source code. The components are regularly updated by a team of engineers and designers to follow the latest Material Design guidelines, ensuring well-crafted implementations that meet development standards such as internationalization and accessibility support. Material Components make it easy to develop rich user experiences using Material Design, and you can pick and choose which components to add to your app or website—Material Design buttons, menus, cards, ripples, and dialogs to name just a few. Check out all the components and documentation: material.io/components

For the latest news or to contribute to the project, visit Material Components on GitHub and follow @materialdesign.

Whether you're dabbling in Millennial Pink or refining an existing color scheme, the new Material Design Color Tool makes it easy to create, share, and apply color palettes to a sample UI across a range of Material Design components. You can also use the tool to test the accessibility of your product’s text and color combinations using WCAG legibility standards.

In addition to the Color Tool, today's release includes updated Material Design guidance on text fields, a new section on text field boxes, and added resources for guidance on right-to-left icons. See what's new.

Follow @materialdesign for the latest news and updates

What do inclusivity, virtual spaces, and ethics have to do with design? Everything. Introducing Design Is [...], a monthly speaker series on the future of design and creativity. Each public talk is centered on a theme—human, inclusive, immersive—and the series will highlight a broad range of perspectives on everything from human-centered design to VR and ethics.

Design Is [...] kicks off today in Google's San Francisco office with VUI Design Lead Nandini Stocker. Today's event is full, but you can follow coverage of the series on Medium for details on upcoming speakers, video (posted two weeks after each event), and information on how to RSVP for future talks in SF.

Put a little spring in your design step with the fifth edition of our Google Design newsletter. We kick off this latest issue with a look back at our 2016 design highlights–reimagined into a design "care package" of publications, stickers, and other items–before springing forward to explore the future of digital interfaces, new Material Design case studies, upcoming events, 5 Things To Love Right Now, and much more.

Subscribe here to get the Google Design Newsletter delivered directly to your inbox.

Last year, Google launched Assistant, a conversational interface that responds to voice requests with actions like launching an app, playing music, or displaying context-aware search results. Assistant was first released on just Pixel phones and Google Home, but will soon be available to hundreds of millions additional users—a huge development in the rapidly expanding world of Voice User Interface design.

At Mobile World Congress, the team announced that the latest version of Assistant will soon be available on Android phones running Marshmallow or Nougat, with high-res screens, as well as LG’s new flagship G6 phone, which will roll out later this year.

This is all in addition to the announcement earlier this year that VUIs will also be integrated into cars and TVs in the coming months. Read more about the rollout.

Material Components are now public! Developed by a core team of Google engineers and UX designers, Material Components help developers implement the Material Design guidelines across Android, iOS, and the web. Preview, contribute, and collaborate: material.io/components.

Updated Material Design guidelines including new sections on best practices for platform adaptation, app shortcut icons, help and feedback for your users, plus updates to the bi-directionality and accessibility sections are now available. Brush up on what's new.

Read the latest edition of our Google Design newsletter for a peek inside Pixel's design details, more Material news, and another installment of 5 Things To Love Right Now. Not a subscriber? Sign up!

Conversations on talent, interaction design, collaboration, and technology by Khoi Vinh, Keller Easterling, Paul Ford, and Julia Zeltser, among others. Workshops on design collaboration, human-centered design, handmade computers, and design writing.

Conversations on everything from Processing and robotics to production design, with Casey Reas, Peter Shire, Jessie Kawata, Shannon Ebner, and many more. Workshops on type design, design writing, and making by hand and eye.

Our list of the best recently published Medium reads:

A designer and product manager share the story of how 63 new emoji—with a focus on gender empowerment and fair gender representation—make their way into your phone. Read more

A Google Design intern discusses his research after a summer designing for autism. Read more

A visual designer unpacks the redesign of the Chrome desktop, which rolled out in September. Read more

Bob Dylan in the news. Last week, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; Ben Davies recently argued for his recognition as a UX sage. Read more

Today, we're proud to announce the winners of the second annual Material Design Awards. Recognizing best-in-class designs from around the community, each award highlights a specific aspect of Material Design across five categories: Brand Infusion, Charming Engagement, Creative Navigation, Expressive Layouts, Focused Efficiency. The five winners will be honored at #SPAN16 in LA on October 27.

Get to know our 2016 Material Design Award winners, and read more about the design behind each of these outstanding apps.

Conversations on machine learning and neural networks, start-up culture, ikebana, and type design, with Deyan Sudjic, Eiko Nagase, Keiichi Tanaami, Mariya Suzuki, and many more. Workshops on pop-up portraiture, and game design.

The latest version of the Material Design Guidelines is now available in Japanese—including an introduction to Material Design principles, motion guidance, accessibility considerations, and much more. Visit material.google.com/jp to download PDFs of the Material Design Guidelines in Japanese.

Related: On 10/6, we're hosting SPAN Tokyo. You can follow all the talks and conversations as-they-happen via our livestream.

For the third installment of our Google Design Newsletter, we focus on fonts. Read more on the new Google Fonts redesign (plus other complementary type-related happenings), get to know what's new on Google Design, and get excited for #SPAN16. We're pleased to announce that we'll be livestreaming both SPAN Tokyo on 10/6 and SPAN LA on 10/27, so that people everywhere can enjoy SPAN. Sign up to receive livestream updates in your inbox and join the conversation at #SPAN16.

Subscribe to the Google Design Newsletter

Check out the new Google Fonts, then go behind-the-scenes to read (and watch) our story on making the directory a better design resource for everyone. With our refresh of Google Fonts, it’s now even easier to browse a collection of open source designer fonts and learn more about the people who make them. Specimen pages, featured collections, and analytics also help you navigate and easily discover great typography.

Read more about the Google Fonts redesign

Visit Google Fonts: fonts.google.com

Type lovers! Don’t miss Rob Giampietro talking typography at Typographics

Sign up to join Kai Haley of Google's Design Relations team to learn about Google Design Sprint Methodology.

The second edition of our Google Design Newsletter ships today. Inside we cover #io16, women emoji in the press, Goals for Google Calendar, and the recent rebrand of GV. We also roundup what’s new with #materialdesign, and bring you the second installment of “5 Things to Love."

Subscribe to the Google Design Newsletter

Whether you’re attending live or livestreaming, we've compiled a go-to guide for design programming at #io16. You’ll find our hand-picked event highlights, office hours for in-person design reviews, and updates to our material design guidelines. We’ll also be expanding the post with links and videos as they become available — stay tuned and check back often.

Follow our #io16 design coverage on Medium

Material design lives in a world that’s a lot like ours—one that’s responsive, natural, aware, and intentional. The newly expanded #materialdesign motion guidelines can help you produce motion that feels natural, while delivering a clear and cohesive experience for your users. Check out the expanded motion guidance and get to know how things move.

Our latest release also includes new sections on growth and communications (so users can quickly understand what they can do with your app), and expansion panels.

Trying to master a new set? Or want to work out more? Google Calendar’s new Goals feature uses delightful illustrations to help you schedule time for what matters in your life, working around unexpected changes in plans, and even learning from your routine and preferences. Find out how the Calendar team designed a unique experience, using illustration as a tool to guide users, and as an integral component that brings a vast range of activities to life.

Learn more about Goals on Medium / Download Google Calendar

Our March 2016 release includes new sections and updates:

A product is accessible when all people—regardless of ability—can use it. We’ve recently expanded #materialdesign guidelines to serve as a primer and comprehensive resource for accessibility considerations. If you’re responsible for determining accessibility standards for your team, or just interested in improving the accessibility of your product for all users—and who isn't?—this is the place to start.

There’s also a new section on bottom navigation—making it easy to explore and switch between top-level views in a single tap.

See what’s new

An easy way to stay up-to-date with our latest and greatest #googledesign news, get updates on features and releases, tips from our team of designers, and much, much more. Check out our first installment and learn all about Resizer, a handy new tool for testing out your responsive UI.

Subscribe to our Newsletter / Read more about Resizer

Conversations on conditional design, privacy, VR, and emerging design tools with Luna Maurer, Justin McGuirk, Jessica Brillhart, and many more. Digital making workshop by Technology Will Save Us.

For the new Google identity, we created a system flexible enough to work across all our marketing materials and products on any platform. The result: three elemental states that make up a single logo.

Go inside the creation of our new brand system.

Matias Duarte answers readers' questions in real time on Designer News.

Conversations on visual storytelling, design education, design tooling, and startups with Matias Duarte, Michael Rock, Jenny Arden, and more. Workshops on science fiction, futurecraft, and the design of wearables.