Google Calendar for Web gets its first redesign since 2011

Google Calendar on the Web is getting a new look. Google announced that the company is "taking a lot of what you know and love from Calendar’s mobile application, like the modern color palette and sleek design, and bringing it to the Web." Calendar is getting a "Material" redesign.

Calendar's existing design is something like six years old. It debuted in 2011 and uses a "red and gray" motif that just isn't Google's style anymore. "Material Design" is Google's current design philosophy, which debuted in 2014 on Android 5.0 Lollipop. The design language usually mixes white backgrounds with bold splashes of color, animation, and lots of whitespace. Information is presented in grids of cards, and the design language usually brings in smartphone motifs like "hamburger" buttons that open navigation panels. Material Design sites tend to look like big smartphone apps.

Before you panic, the Calendar layout doesn't look that different from the current interface—the layout mostly looks like Google Calendar today with bigger date headers. The major differences seem to be in the little touches, like Material Design's trademark round action buttons and fonts. The event card that pops up when you click on an appointment looks all new. It now looks less like a weird speech bubble and more like a card of information, with a bright header, a top row of control buttons, and contact pictures next to each attendee.

With the redesign, calendar is getting a few new features, too. When you book a conference room, Google says Calendar will be able to show details about that room like "where a conference room is located, how large it is, and whether it has audio/video equipment or is wheelchair accessible." G Suite admins will need to enter all of this information into Calendar for it to show up in the meeting room results, but it sounds handy. Calendar invites can also now use rich formatting, so you can link to any relevant documents in the event details or just style some text.

In day view, you can now stick multiple calendars side by side, each in its own column. This sounds great for comparing calendars from multiple people, allowing you to visualize exactly when you should schedule that group meeting. The current day view is a huge waste of horizontal space on a desktop monitor, so this is a nice improvement.

The Google Calendar redesign is available now. Personal users of Google Calendar can opt-in to the new style by clicking the "Use new calendar" button in the upper right, while G Suite users will need their admin to opt-in company-wide. Next up on Google's redesign plate has got to be Gmail, which is using the same 2011-era design that was just replaced for Calendar.

Change is coming, people! Complain about it in the comments below.