Google continues to steamroll over its own sites with its new, unified design, to increasingly doubtful effects. While Google's plan, to have all of its sites look and feel the same, sounds great on paper, it seems that the execution may leave some things to be desired.
The problem is that Google has a lot of sites and a design that works best on all of them is hard to create, maybe even impossible.
Google is trying though, the latest entrant, or maybe victim, to the redesign binge is Google Books.
By now, the new Google interface should feel rather familiar, it's used in some of Google's most popular websites.
The big, spaced out header is there, with the search bar and buttons, as well as the other common elements, such as the themed buttons and color scheme.
Thankfully, one thing that didn't make it is the gray/red color pair for side menu links, which is used in the search engine, on Google+, in Gmail and so on.
Rather, Google Books gets the familiar blue links with the currently selected section or filter in black.
Still, the side menu is more spaced out than before, which makes it look better and less dense, but squeezes the content to the right and means that the subjects list goes off the first page, below the fold.
The preview screen is left pretty much unchanged, though it too is squeezed due to the ever-present header, which is visible even when toggling the full screen mode.
Some of the flaws in Google's new design are beginning to show as more and more products adopt it, but Google's first order of business is probably to get everyone in line before starting to tweak the overall design to work better with some of its sites.
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