Companies committed to a culture of antidesign (also consultants like Jakob Nielsen) may occasionally succeed in the marketplace, but they do so in spite of their antidesign, not because of it. Of course we can’t prove that; we can’t run a controlled experiment, let alone 41 of them with distinct shades of blue. It is merely one of those things a visually literate person knows. The fact that you don’t know it, or you deny it’s important, or deny it even can be known goes to show you really are better suited to programming a computer all day than dealing with actual human beings.

From The extreme Google brain ¶ Personal Weblog of Joe Clark, Toronto.

Wonderful little essay on Joe Clark’s view of Google design from the outside. It’s harsh, blunt and believable.

This week, I didn’t use Google Docs because it demoralised me to interact with a crass pastiche of Microsoft Office 2000.

This is getting to the point of feeling genuine revulsion toward certain pastel shades of blue. Via: blog.fawny.org.