Material 3 Expressive

As someone who works in UX, I admire all the work the Google UX team puts into Material: tons of documentation, UI kits, theme generation tools, a lot of thinking on systematizing the color combinations, etc.

However, this article has a lot of "Pepsi Logo" vibes (https://www.scribd.com/document/541500744/Pepsi-Arnell-02110...). I never confirmed if this was a hoax, but it was made into many news websites at the time.

Many design justifications they put on the page don't make much sense: yes, a big send button increases the metric of people finding the button, but it also takes space from the screen, and your daily phone UI is not a kiosk. "New users" become "experienced users", so the big button quickly becomes annoying. Even the M3 documentation site is terrible on mobile: the tab switch at the headers of some docs is so big that just two tabs don't fit into the screen.

By contrast, Apple, which is often praised for its product aesthetics, never makes marketing content like this about its design language. It may present creating emojis as a huge feature or inflate some of its claims a bit, but in general, they let the product do the talking.

> However, this article has a lot of "Pepsi Logo" vibes

So wildly successful that we're all still talking about it even though they don't even use that logo any more?

I'm not sure we're talking about it because it was successful, I think we're talking about it because the design document for it was insane:

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

Which was a lot of work, to achieve the apt: https://www.utne.com/arts/new-pepsi-logo-is-a-joke/

But it has a 30% increase in the key attribute of “rebelliousness”!

What is the point of branding but to be remembered? It worked!

> By contrast, Apple, which is often praised for its product aesthetics, never makes marketing content like this about its design language. It may present creating emojis as a huge feature or inflate some of its claims a bit, but in general, they let the product do the talking.

On top of that, when Apple makes a change or does a redesign, it's usually not overly disruptive (new macOS settings aside). The core functionality and layouts remain more or less the same, but it's just a new coat of paint. I still use my Mac the same way today, with the same keyboard shortcuts and workflow I did in 2006. Meanwhile, Windows has gone through no less than 5 total UI disruptions since then.

Reeks of "we asked about 1000 attributes and took our favourite ones that happened to go up" despite those increases not being statistically significant.

> it's usually not overly disruptive (new macOS settings aside). The core functionality and layouts remain more or less the same

ios 18 photos app?

lol no it did not https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/Dr-Pepper-Ties-Pepsi-as-A...

Being infamous is not the same thing as being successful.

> By contrast, Apple, which is often praised for its product aesthetics, never makes marketing content like this about its design language

I clearly remember the Jony-Ive-hagiography era, which I assume was organized by Apple PR/marketing. Perhaps it's more accurate to say Apple doesn't do this anymore.

I'm not talking about the company's effectiveness in selling sugar-water with the branding attached; I'm talking about the branding's effectiveness at being remembered. A person wants to criticize some unrelated UI design and the very first thing that comes to their mind is “lol this reminds me of The Gravitational Pull of Pepsi!!”. It will live forever.

True, even Apple has been slipping lately too, particularly with apps.

At least the core OS hasn't gone through a reinvention yet.

Similar to Settings app I think the Photos app was because they rewrote it in Swift.

You're assuming the goal of the marketing is merely "to be remembered". But it's not. It's to be remembered in some positive way, or at least some way that still increases sales. This campaign will live forever as a laughing stock. That wasn't its intention.

Understood. But also “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

Scare quotes because obviously there is, but I don’t think this example crosses the line.

Even if one takes it as being on that side of the fence, which I'm not sure I actually buy myself, I'm also still not convinced getting some a niche of folks aware of marketing and brand design documents to have such an association form would deserved to be called wildly successful. Usually you want a significant portion of the population to have a common association with a brand as large as Pepsi, not a small portion to have a rare association.

Oh wow. To everyone who, like me, hadn't seen the document before: You might wanna sit down before this one.

I hope the rewrite will eventually allow me to tell it to stop pausing sync for "optimizing system performance". Every time I find that my photos have not uploaded despite the phone being locked on the charger for hours it is because of Optimizing System Performance. What a joke.

Yep. One of my top annoyances. I don’t pay for top tier internet to wait hours for ten goddamn photos I just took to upload to the cloud so my Mac Photos library can see it.