They got phone design right.

I just can't get my head around it that even Apple, which is supposed to be THE design company, is making phones that can't lay on a table without wobbling like a barstool on a crooked floor. It just feels so broken to me. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.

Google phones tackled it with an elegant solution. Thanks for that. I wouldn't know what phone to use if Pixels didn't exist.

Extremely sluggish on non-Chrome. Starts with a black blank empty page. Fans spinning. Takes way too long to load for just some text and some videos. Clicking a link does some SPA magic that takes me to another black blank page, and takes ages to load. Clicking back doesn't work anymore. I need to reload the entire page, again blank and waiting. Once done loading, scrolling is extremely sluggish.

Yes, there are probably some interactive widgets in there, but all that and much more has been done without bogging down the browser like you're running a 3D game on WebGL.

Oh, and of course reader mode doesn't work.

However, there was one spot where I had to give it to them: when I hovered over the content about Google Sans Code, it expanded horizontally. For a second, I wondered what was going on, then it clicked that the content must be horizontally scrollable, which it was!

Of course, that could be shown with a much more obvious horizontal scroll bar...

Pretty much every font I try has one or two things that bug me. I’ve spent the last ten years making my own, first in FontForge, now in Glyphs.app, but it’s incredibly time-consuming. I’ll work on it for a while, then give up for months, delete everything, switch to a different font, use it for a few days, start hating it… and end up back at making my own font again. This cycle repeats pretty much every year.

You’ll probably want to recommend your favourite font, but trust me, I’ve tried all the well-known ones, and they all have their quirks.

Edit: I’m going to try Guguru (“Google” pronounced with a Japanese accent) Sans Code for a few days → https://github.com/yuru7/guguru-sans-code , created by https://x.com/tawara_san

Isn't this an incredible waste of bandwidth? Surely people only need the font once.

  > Product teams eagerly adopted Google Sans and Google Sans Text but soon highlighted a new issue: Billions of people around the globe use non-Latin scripts like Arabic, Chinese, ... The effort was monumental. It meant meticulously crafting hundreds of thousands of new ... from the flowing curves of Arabic to the complex strokes of Japanese and the distinct ...

That above quoted part reads to me like "oh and there's of course the fusion version of this micro nuclear because that's important", which makes little sense, so I searched around a bit just in case, and there doesn't seem to be non-Latin versions of Google Sans. The credit section does not mention obvious source of easily licensable CJK font other than "U+ Type", either.

My assumption would be that either they made an assumption that a font in CJK can't take that long relative to font in Latin, or they couldn't get one in favorable terms and the full version is proprietary. Or is it really coming later? That would be interesting if that's the case.

some fonts individually have beautiful glyps or characters but when you preview them with blocks and blocks of code, there's a quirkiness that throws of that symmetry.

I'll give a few examples:

- Mono Lisa font https://www.monolisa.dev/ (truly gorgeous font)

- Recursive https://www.recursive.design/ (particularly note the casual axis)

I bring this up because Google Sans Code, is super quirky; preview a few characters individually and they look good; put it all together in real code, and it's just not as smooth visually.

Ok, who wants to tell them?

I use Avenir on my Samsung phone, which is also pretty nice. I like Circular, Proxima Nova and Frutiger too, but they are all very expensive.

This font is free, flexible and genuinely really nice to look at. It's a good day for font nerds like me.

Clickable elements seem to be underlined with the exception of one: the Google Design logo in the left upper corner. It seems inconsistent and confusing.

Are those new principles of designing things - making it more confusing and more difficult to find (and then click) for 0 gain?

EDIT: also scrolling all the way down is difficult because random stuff block the page, gets loaded. There is "Privacy & Terms" link at the bottom that is impossible to reach because of it. The design is just terrible, wtf Google?