Google Design with Style
APR 14th 2008 • 7 Comments
A new project I've gotten myself into came spur of the moment one weekend. It's essentially a redesign of google, giving users the ability to search with style. There have been a few attempts at redesigning google before, like here and here. But let's face it, Google's interface is very usable and clean, and we've all grown very accustomed to it, so there's little to be gained from reorganizing the structure or moving elements around. So I decided to approach it from another perspective and spice it up with graphics and cutting edge CSS techniques.
The Idea
Well first, this tweet by Dan Cederholm got me thinking about all the domains that google has registered. They own googlecom.com, gooogle.com, gooooogle.com, as well as many others I'm sure. What's crazy is that others will register all combinations of o's in google.com. Domain parking should be illegal or something. So anyway, to my surprise, google with 56 o's was available! So I registered it, not really sure what to do with it. Then later it occurred to me that I might as well spice it up a little bit, and goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com was born! Or, g56ogle.com for short.
My Plan
So my plan is to continue to build in themes for it and then put in a user selectable CSS switcher so people can choose from any number of themes. Something like this that mixes in some jQuery I think would be pretty cool. As another plus, it gives me a creative outlet for web designs and new CSS techniques. But I'd eventually like to set it up so that anybody can submit a theme, all that's needed is a new stylesheet!
Hope you like it! =)
Joey Trimmer • Apr 14th 2008 • 6:36 pm
Neato!
I wonder if there is a way to be able to login to your google account and use it's "widgets" and other areas of google, like images, etc?
But for just plain ol' surfing this is purdy for sure!
Dave Joyce • Apr 14th 2008 • 6:49 pm
Thanks! Yeah, that would be cool. Right now I'm just using adsense to provide the search capability. (possible revenue stream too : )
I guess if there's an API available to work with that would work well. I'll see how well search by itself does first.
Kevin • Apr 18th 2008 • 11:36 am
goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com
Looks Good Dave, Keep up the good work !!
Shey • Apr 18th 2008 • 11:59 am
Great job Dave that looks great -- congrats on getting listed on CSS Mania!
Eli • Apr 23rd 2008 • 12:50 am
Haha, love it :)
delo • Apr 26th 2008 • 12:32 pm
Very good idea. when i choose the brown theme, the leters "G56ogle" doesn`t apear, and when i try to serch something, the the green theme apears. WHY??
Dave Joyce • Apr 26th 2008 • 12:36 pm
@delo Because the future.html file there is a work in progress. The brown them isn't finished yet. I'm actually not too sure about the brown anyway, it lacks soul =/