Since even after 2 hours nobody is discussing the actual font, let me tell you what comes to my mind when I read anything about Google and design:
They got phone design right.
I just can't get my head around it that even Apple, which is supposed to be THE design company, is making phones that can't lay on a table without wobbling like a barstool on a crooked floor. It just feels so broken to me. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.
Google phones tackled it with an elegant solution. Thanks for that. I wouldn't know what phone to use if Pixels didn't exist.
Too bad Pixel support for factory-broken screens sucks so my "well designed" Pixel has green vertical line in the middle of the screen. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.
Like the other commenter, my mind also fixated on the mouse cursor. Great post on the fonts, but I spent most of my time seeing how the strange cursor behaved. I don't like it much, especially because there's some inconsistency once you're down hovering over the related posts.
However, there was one spot where I had to give it to them: when I hovered over the content about Google Sans Code, it expanded horizontally. For a second, I wondered what was going on, then it clicked that the content must be horizontally scrollable, which it was!
Of course, that could be shown with a much more obvious horizontal scroll bar...
A bit OT: What's up with the mouse pointer on that page? Why on earth would a site that has "design" in it's domain name change my mouse pointer to a finger-sized circle blob on my 4K desktop screen?
it's part of the Material Design 3 branding, for some reason. The original thread for the launch of the design system [1] is full of people baffled by Google making a cursor that lags
There is something about the page that makes me dizzy on mobile. I’m not sure if it’s a subtle animation but I get the feeling of things moving/deforming while I read.
I have the same thing reading this page. It feels really similar to the overscroll stretch animation in Android (12?+) which makes me feel ill and unfortunately often doesn't respect animation settings.
This is a great case study in need-driven design. I especially like how every iteration of Google Sans came from a concrete usability failure—legibility, scale, language support, or developer ergonomics—rather than aesthetics alone. Open-sourcing Flex feels like a natural extension of that philosophy, not just a branding move.
They got phone design right.
I just can't get my head around it that even Apple, which is supposed to be THE design company, is making phones that can't lay on a table without wobbling like a barstool on a crooked floor. It just feels so broken to me. So detrimental to my sense of aesthetics.
Google phones tackled it with an elegant solution. Thanks for that. I wouldn't know what phone to use if Pixels didn't exist.
However, there was one spot where I had to give it to them: when I hovered over the content about Google Sans Code, it expanded horizontally. For a second, I wondered what was going on, then it clicked that the content must be horizontally scrollable, which it was!
Of course, that could be shown with a much more obvious horizontal scroll bar...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352
To be fair, they re-implemented feeds for YouTube and added feed support in Google Workspace the other day[2]. So perhaps there's hope.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader
[2] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2025/12/introducing-...