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Sebastien Gabriel
NET
|Summer 2016
<p>The Google designer on keeping Chrome consistent and new paradigms in UI design SebaStien Gabriel.</p>
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Four years ago the Chrome team turned to Dribbble in their search for a visual designer. They found the portfolio of Sebastien Gabriel, an unknown designer working in the south of France. The chance discovery launched Gabriel into an exciting career working on design problems that affect the experiences of hundreds of millions of people, and four years later he’s still relishing that challenge. We chatted to him about his journey from obscurity to the tech bubble in San Francisco, the Chrome 50 redesign, and the evolving scope of UX and UI design.
net: Tell us about what you do at Google ...
SG: My primary project has been to work on the Chrome browser on all platforms, including Android, iOS and Windows. I’m responsible for its visual consistency throughout this wide range of platforms. I get asked quite often what there is to design in a browser, but it is more complex than it seems. Designing a UI that is supposed to be as discreet as possible can be a tricky task. Lately I’ve refocused my efforts towards helping evolve the Chrome OS platform.
net: What are the challenges of ensuring consistency across different platforms?
SG: Maintaining consistency in the long run is the hard part because we do not redesign everything at once, but in waves bound to our six-week release cycle. While redesigning Chrome for Android, we also had to think about how this would translate to iOS even though this work was a year away. We try to ensure consist
This story is from the Summer 2016 edition of NET.
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