Looks like the brilliant minds at Google have never heard of <a> tags.

The sad part is that they do use <a> tags! The site just does other stupid shit to break basic expectations about primary functionality, because "design! (handwave)". This is the kind of sewage that bubbles up when programmers learn about the web through single page app frameworks. There's a whole generation of front end developers now who seemingly don't know what a hyperlink is or why they might be worth using. Not every stupid website needs to be an app.

The state of design is in shambles. Every designer out there is heavily influenced by trends and frameworks. No one uses tables anymore even for legitimate uses. So much excess whitespace everywhere (Discourse forums vs. phpBB for example). Infinite scroll. Dark mode everywhere (hard to read text) and general copy-cat behavior from designers.

Every website today looks like Stripe, every startup has a magenta theme, gradients are back (even Apple embraced it).

What the fuck are designers doing without understanding the fundamentals of unobtrusive design? What happened to the principles laid out the Otl Aicher, Muller-brockmann, Anton Stankowski, Elliot Noyes and the likes - what we call the International Design movement?

I absolutely hate design of everything today. And the designers. And their ecosystems and frameworks. Javascript is the worst programming language of all. The whole thing reeks of amateurs running around making the world a noisier place.

Google's own design page doesn't meet their performance test. Last I checked, it scored 55/100. Who is Google(and their designers) to tell the world how to design things? In science, we have to write papers, provide data and get the work peer reviewed. In design, you just publish and the louder one gets heard.

Sigh.

> Last I checked, it scored 55/100.

39.

> Who is Google(and their designers) to tell the world how to design things?*

Indeed. They deserve giant middle fingers from all sides for this shit. I can't remember the last time I saw anything from design.google that wasn't a shitshow of bad practices and simultaneously pompous.

A flat site with a few links loads 400KB _after_ compression of javascript? Fuck all the way off, google.

> every startup has a magenta theme

Don’t be ridiculous. Many of them have orange and gray, orange and lime, or orange and purple!

And yet none of the 'cards' are links you cam middle click, ctrl click, right click on, but if you click on them they open in new tab.

Anybody know what happened to Stage? Google acquired two great tools, Form and Pixate, and announced[0] that they are building a prototyping tool from both of these teams. That was the last we heard about Stage.

[0]: https://design.google/library/design-never-done/

The People + AI handbook is fantastic - full of well thought out, actionable advice on designing UIs on top of machine learning.

Text entry fields with no border are the worst, if they are blank you can’t even tell they are there.

The notes field on a contact in IOS is a good example of this unfriendly design. the amount of tapping I’ve done to try to figure out how to enter a note on a contact...

I've heard a number of complaints that google itself did not adhere to the principles they are promoting, especially in material design.

Should set up a redirect from google.design. If I remember this exists I'm going to randomly start typing variations of this.