For the longest time, Google has been a company that fancies function over form, but that has changed in the past few years since Matias Duarte came along in 2010 and Material Design guidelines were introduced in 2015.
(Both Gabriel and I have a bit of a soft spot for Matias and Palm’s WebOS as he was the chief UI designer behind that project. We both share a fondness of that phone and its OS for sure.)
Once Material Design began permeating everything under Google’s purview, one of the services I couldn’t wait to see get a material treatment was Google Calendar. I’ve used Google Calendar for many years and, despite its superior functionality, operating its UI on the web has always been a pain point. Not only is it a bit clunky in navigation; it is just ugly.
The Android app for Google Calendar was updated a few years back and has been an attractive and easy-to-navigate service. As a matter of fact, I tend to interact with my phone for the calendar as often as possible. The navigation makes much more sense and it isn’t ugly.
That’s Finally Ready To Change
Luckily, the days of avoiding my desktop for calendar purposes are coming to a close. According to this Reddit post (via Engadget), the whole Google Calendar design is getting a Material makeover.
You can click into the post and see more screenshots than what we have above, but this change will put Google Calendar in line with other Google services and the Android app as well.
It is unclear at this point when we’ll start seeing this change roll out to users, but it is a welcome change that looks to be pretty far along at this point. Hopefully we don’t have long to wait.
