Lance Ulanoff ruminates over Google's redesigns:
I’m reading Steve Jobs’s biography right now and learned that he hated — HATED — corners. Everything had to be curved. He was obsessed with chamfers. Take a look at your iPhone or iPad and you’ll see that design sensibility. Google, though, is going the other way.
Gmail for the iPhone is all hard lines of black, white and gray. There are thin lines and black bars. The icons are simply reverses on their black backgrounds.There’s just a tiny bit of color and impishness in there, like the use of a 3.5-inch floppy icon for "Save." Otherwise, it’s the culmination of a trend that’s been running through all of Google’s products for months and accelerating in recent days.
Alan Jacobs draws an analogy for the Reader row:
Google is saying to social-minded Reader users, "We’re going to kill the social network we’ve been freely providing for you. Please use this other social network we’re now freely providing for you. Because of course there’s no way we’ll ever kill that one." User = Charlie Brown, Google = Lucy, Google’s services = the football. I’ve seen how that turns out.
The Dish 