Since even after 2 hours nobody is discussing the actual font, let me tell you what comes to my mind when I read anything about Google and design:
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.
I've just got a new Samsung and it's wobbling too. I hate this. Why can't they at least put the cameras in the middle? Or maybe horizontally centred? Or they could just put another bumper on the other side to make it symmetrical. I'm looking for a cover to balance this out, but no luck so far.
I don't think there's a single modern smartphone that I like. My latest favourite smartphone was iPhone 4S. No camera bump. Perfect size, fits well in my hand, operable with one thumb. Perfect display size, enough to present all information I need. Perfectly usable without ugly case.
Too bad Pixel support for factory-broken screens sucks so my "well designed" Pixel has green vertical line in the middle of the screen. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.
Cool work on a font, but this page is proof that google is turning the web into some kind of JSON for their app, Chrome.
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.
Like the other commenter, my mind also fixated on the mouse cursor. Great post on the fonts, but I spent most of my time seeing how the strange cursor behaved. I don't like it much, especially because there's some inconsistency once you're down hovering over the related posts.
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...
To declare "open source", you have to provide a way for the public to get access to the source code. But there seems to be none at least for the time being.
A bit OT: What's up with the mouse pointer on that page? Why on earth would a site that has "design" in it's domain name change my mouse pointer to a finger-sized circle blob on my 4K desktop screen?
it's part of the Material Design 3 branding, for some reason. The original thread for the launch of the design system [1] is full of people baffled by Google making a cursor that lags
Cursor feels terrible. Native cursor moves very fast. This cursor does not feel native and moves very slow and sluggish. Do they paint it with Canvas or something like that?
There is something about the page that makes me dizzy on mobile. I’m not sure if it’s a subtle animation but I get the feeling of things moving/deforming while I read.
I have the same thing reading this page. It feels really similar to the overscroll stretch animation in Android (12?+) which makes me feel ill and unfortunately often doesn't respect animation settings.
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.
I don't think there's a single modern smartphone that I like. My latest favourite smartphone was iPhone 4S. No camera bump. Perfect size, fits well in my hand, operable with one thumb. Perfect display size, enough to present all information I need. Perfectly usable without ugly case.
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.
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...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352
Ok, who wants to tell them?
To be fair, they re-implemented feeds for YouTube and added feed support in Google Workspace the other day[2]. So perhaps there's hope.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader
[2] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/12/introducing-...