alt Hacker NewsWhen 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
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maybe the golden ratio was the friends we made along the way
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.
Ironically many of the website’s examples look worse than what they compare against. Taste is personal, I guess.
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.)
Chrome is so much not a reference in design that we should take this take carefully
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.
"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?
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.