Color really is capable of evoking sensations and evoking memory, evoking happiness or sadness, even when thinking about that on the surface of a map and reflecting these natural places, that's really powerful.
When I joined Google Maps pretty quickly I realized that there was just a lot of complexity on the map, like 700 colors.
The process really started with a hypothesis that we were able to reduce this really complex system down to a core set of colors, but also bring this life or energy to the map.
It wasn't really even about choosing colors, like out of the air.
It was about looking at this palette that we use for most design at Google, and then looking at the natural landscape and seeing how we could draw those connections.
Some of the areas, while we sort of had a notion of what they looked like, surprised us.
Previously, the color for the Tundra area that is North of Canada was this light gray, which in reality was not actually how it looked in satellite imagery, which is these stone-deep grays.
Large swaths of desert areas in Africa didn't feel reflective of the places themselves.
It really didn't sit right with me in terms of understanding regionally what that desert actually looks like.
You need to believe what you're seeing on the map, that's so important and you need to have the confidence that it's reflecting the world that you're living in.
