When Matias Duarte stood up on stage during Google I/O 2014 and introduced Material Design, it was pretty clear that this was a fresh design for all of Google, and not just Android. Over the last five years or so, Google has become a company that cares about design and while Search and GMail have never been the prettiest outlets online, that’s changing these days. Material Design has now made its way to pretty much every key Google app on Android, and some on iOS as well, but now it appears to be rolling out to online services as well. Google Stars is one of them.
You might not be familiar with Google Stars, but it’s essentially a new Bookmark Manager from Google. Essentially, you just hit the star in the address bar and then you’ve bookmarked something like normal. However, how you interact with your starred pages is a lot different from the old way in Chrome, and it’s much neater. The service has recently been given a Material Makeover and Stars now feels more like a modern Google app. It doesn’t go all the way of course, this isn’t the sort of Material design as we see with Android apps but it is nice to see a little more uniformity from Google across their products.
Stars is hopefully just the beginning, and that more of Google’s online services will get a Material design makeover as we head into 2015. Inbox on the web has a nice Material look and feel to it, but it’s clear that Google can do a lot more with this new design language. A fresh coat of paint could help keep people using Google services and potentially bring new users in. For Chrome users looking for a material design theme, you can try out Material for Chrome by Austin Clark. When Google will start rolling out a Material theme to Chrome or Chrome OS as a whole we don’t know, but we’re sure looking forward to it.
