Google Calendar prioritizes clean layouts by embracing generous white space. This eliminates the need for visual containers and unnecessary dividers. Instead, the design relies on clear element alignment and an adaptive spacing system to ensure a structured user interface across all platforms.
However, to truly elevate Calendar's brand identity within the suite, we prioritized core Calendar elements like the grid and today indicator.
This achievement wasn't solely reliant on UI design; The biggest challenge for me was to achieve consensus among stakeholders and ensure consistent technical implementation across multiple teams.
As with all other design efforts within the Workspace and Google ecosystem this project required close collaboration across teams and disciplines. While each implementation had its own personality, key UX and UI patterns were shared on both the design and engineering side. This collaborative approach significantly reduced development timeframes, enabling us to deliver the entire suite of widgets within a mere few weeks.
With color labels we saw an additional opportunity: a few months earlier the team had introduced Time Insights – a new way to help users better understand how they spend their time. Initially, Time Insights focused solely on event types and meeting attendees. We recognized the potential for even greater user value and strategically expanded the feature to include breakdowns based on user-defined color labels.
