In its latest attempt to unify the design of its services an eliminate clutter, Google today introduced the “Google bar,” a single area up top that will be the same over all its services. For some time, Google has had a thin bar running on the top of its services, showing the most important apps like Calendar, Gmail, Google+, etc, with links to each service. In the last six months, it changed the color of that bar to black and added a Google+ notification and sharing button to it. Well, those who hate the black bar can rejoice. It’s now being merged with the search bar below it.
Today Google unveiled its new Google bar. The new bar appears thicker than the old one, but does the job of two. All Google services are now able to be discovered by hovering over the Google logo on any screen. To the right of that will always be a search bar, and then the Google+ buttons will be on the right, but this time notifications will be in a pleasant green instead of that nagging red that Google has been favoring lately.
Google has created a little video on its blog page, if you care to see the bar in action. So, what do you think? Combining the bars seems like a step in the right direction and falls in line with the recent redesign of Google News (all news categories are now in a drop-down menu). Still, I think there’s too much black. Having any dark black and grey looks pretty ugly next to Google’s typically light and white designs.
Google did not say, but we assume that this change will begin taking effect for users immediately, or in the near future. We haven’t yet experienced the new design.
