Thursday, February 5, 2009

Google’s Custom Buttons

Douglas Bowman describes how he came up with the implementation for Google’s custom buttons, used in applications like Gmail, which recently launched a button redesign. “The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design. The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior. They’re also easily skinnable with a few lines of CSS, which was a key factor now that Gmail has themes.”

Custom interfaces can often look & feel better, though they also sometimes come with accessibility or usability issues. For instance, in the latest Gmail redesign the highlight color within a button-selection box is a light yellow which is so subtle that it’s nearly lost on this suboptimal laptop screen, depending on the surrounding light.

[Via Reddit.]

Google’s Custom Buttons by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2)

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