The eleven faces of Google Font’s empty states
As I was scouring the typography jungle that is google fonts, filtering through the different categories: Serif, Sans Serif, Display, Handwriting, Monospace,
I playfully unchecked everything and stumbled upon a delightful discovery.
The different faces of it’s empty states.
- The cat.
2. The thumbs up triangle-mouth dude.
3. The thumbs up normal-mouth dude
4. The emoji you always type in nokia phones
5. Your squeamish friend
6. Your squeamish friend that’s about to throw up
7. The guy with the star-shaped mole
8. Your face after watching Avengers
9. Your face when Thanos was about to get the Soul Stone
10. The legend of the Fingerless fists
11. Why is Gamora
Wait, what’s the lesson here?
Normally, empty states have instructions in them, suggesting actions you need to take like this one from dropbox, asking you to drag and drop files to upload.
Since checkboxes behave like an on and off switch, Google didn’t add any instruction anymore. Users unchecked everything before reaching the empty states, so they must already know to just check any of those boxes for the fonts to reappear. Google instead used that moment to delight their users instead.
Lastly, you might want to check out this website dedicated to just capturing the empty states from different sources.
Have a great day! :)
Thanks for reading!
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