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During a recent visit to Google’s Color, Material and Finish (better known as CMF) studio, I watched while Jess Ng and Jenny Davis opened drawer after drawer and placed object after object on two white tables. A gold hoop earring, a pale pink shell — all pieces of inspiration that Google designers use to come up with new colors for devices, including the just-launched Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro.

“We find inspiration everywhere,” Jenny says. “It’s not abnormal to have a designer come to the studio with a toothbrush or some random object they found on their walk or wherever.”

The CMF team designs how a Google device will physically look and feel. “Color, material and finish are a big part of what defines a product,” Jess, a CMF hardware designer, says. “It touches on the more emotional part of how we decide what to buy.” And Jenny, CMF Manager for devices and services, agrees. “We always joke around that in CMF, the F stands for ‘feelings,’ so we joke that we design feelings.”

The new Pixel 6 comes in Sorta Seafoam and Kinda Coral, while the Pixel 6 Pro comes in Sorta Sunny and Cloudy White, and both are available in Stormy Black. Behind those five shades are years of work, plenty of trial and error…and lots and lots of fine-tuning. “It’s actually a very complex process,” Jenny says.

Mademore complex by COVID-19. Both Jenny and Jess describe the color selection process as highly collaborative and hands-on, which was difficult to accomplish while working from home. Designers aren’t just working with their own teams, but with those on the manufacturing and hardware side as well. “We don’t design color after the hardware design is done — we actually do it together,” Jenny says. The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro’s new premium look and feel influenced the direction of the new colors, and the CMF team needed to see colors and touch items in order to select and eliminate the shades.

They don’t only go hands-on with the devices, they do the same with sources of inspiration. “I remember one time I really wanted to share this color because I thought it would be really appropriate for one of our products, so I ended up sending my boss one of my sweaters through a courier delivery!” Jenny says. “We found creative workarounds.”

The team that designed the new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro case colors did as well. “The CMF team would make models and then take photos of the models and I would try to go in and look at them in person and physically match the case combinations against the different phone colors,” says Nasreen Shad, a Pixel Accessories product manager. “Then we’d render or photograph them and send them around to the team to review and see if what was and wasn’t working.” In addition to the challenge of working remotely, Nasreen’s team was also working on something entirely new: colorful, translucent cases.

Nasreen says they didn’t want to cover up the phones, but complement them instead, so they went with a translucent tinted plastic. Each device has a case that corresponds to its color family, but you can mix and match them for interesting new shades.

That process involved lots of experimenting. For example, what eventually became the Golden Glow case started out closer to a bronze color, which didn’t pair as well with the Stormy Black phone. “We had to tune it to a peachy shade, so that it looked good with its ‘intended pairing,’ Sorta Sunny, but with everything else, too. That meant ordering more resins and color chips in different tones, but it ended with some really beautiful effects.”

Beautiful effects, and tons of options. “I posted a picture of all of the possible combinations you can make with the phones and the cases and people kept asking me, ‘how many phones did Google just release!?’” Nasreen laughs. “And I had to be like, ‘No, no, no, these are just the cases!’”

50 years ago this month, Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email. He was a programmer working on ARPANET, the system that laid the groundwork for what would become the internet as we know it today. He tested the messaging system by sending emails to himself, and later said that the first note was probably something like “QWERTYUIOP.”

More than 30 years after this breakthrough, a Google engineer named Paul Buchheit conducted his own email experiments. In a 2005 blog post, Paul described the problem he was trying to solve:

“My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble…I couldn’t always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it.” These pain points are part of what motivated Paul to come up with a better system — Gmail.

Buchheit created Gmail as a browser-based email program that allowed users to easily search their own messages. “With Gmail, I got the opportunity to change email — to build something that would work for me, not against me.” He wasn’t sure what the reception would be like, but when he released a beta to fellow Googlers, they wanted more.

Eventually, Gmail launched to the public on April 1, 2004. Its search function was lightning fast and it came with 1 GB of storage — 500 times more than prevailing inboxes of the time. But that wasn’t enough to convince people it wasn’t a joke. (The date — April Fool’s Day — likely had something to do with it.)

Despite the launch day hijinks, Gmail won consumers over, and became a central part of the work we do at Google. But we never could have done it if Ray Tomlinson hadn’t hit that @ sign and started it all 50 years ago. To celebrate, we asked a few Googlers to share their favorite Gmail hacks.

Laura Mae Martin, Executive Productivity Advisor

“It’s hard to answer old emails when there are shiny new ones coming in. Use features like Snooze and Starred emails and different inbox setups to make it easier to stay on task.”

John Shriver-Blake, Senior Product Manager, Gmail Enterprise

“I’m a fan of confidential mode in Gmail. It lets you protect sensitive information in messages and attachments and ensures that whoever receives the confidential email can’t forward, copy or print it.”

Neena Kamath, Product Lead, Gmail

“What I love about Gmail is how it’s evolved over the years. Fifteen years ago, I was obsessed with Conversation View! Back then, having all your emails about a single topic in one place hadn’t been done before, and it saved me so much time. Now, I’m obsessed with Smart Reply. It not only saves me time, but also makes me more polite : )!”

Bao Lam, Head of Marketing, Gmail & Chat

“Schedule send in Gmail means that I don’t clutter up people’s inboxes if I’m catching up on emails at odd moments — which is especially helpful when so many of us are working across different time zones.”

You can learn more about the history of email, Gmail and the power of the @ sign over on the Cloud blog.

Earlier this year, Google’s Women Techmakers launched “Tech Bytes,” a series featuring Black women engineers and developers at Google. Tech Bytes supports our broader effort to spotlight Black women in tech by sharing their technical expertise, and creating a space for Black women in the industry to connect.

For our latest episode of Tech Bytes, we sat down with Kendra Claiborne, an Application Engineer at YouTube, to learn more about her role and passion for technology.

Tell us about your path to joining the tech industry. Where were you before?

My journey into tech started when I was eight years old, building websites for fun and searching online to learn how the computer works. My passion for programming led me to pursue a degree in Computer Science at the University at Buffalo. During my undergraduate years, I took an internship at a startup that specialized in building custom applications on the Salesforce platform. I was very unfamiliar with Salesforce when I first started, but I was excited to learn something new. Since that internship, I’ve built both frontend (user-facing) and backend solutions on the Salesforce platform for customers in many different industries. Those opportunities led me to the YouTube Content Partnerships Systems team in 2020.

Tell us about your role on that team. What do you do day to day?

I’m an Application Engineer, and I’ve carried my past experience into this role by focusing on building frontend and backend solutions on the Salesforce platform. Each day is slightly different from the next. My team applies the agile methodology for software development, which means we deliver feature requests or fix bugs incrementally instead of all at once. We participate in two-week “sprints” to get these done most efficiently. Leading up to a sprint, I am laser focused on mapping out the design for a feature request, which involves a lot of research and collaboration with the team and project lead. Once we’ve defined our approach and the tasks required to accomplish it, we focus on building out the features. I’ll spend the next 5-8 days coding, testing and submitting my code for peer review — after which, it will get deployed to our staging environments. A staging environment is like a testing ground, where we can make sure our code is working as intended before we push it live. At the end of the sprint, if our deliverables have been approved for Quality Assurance (QA) — meaning they have reliable performance and functionality — they’ll be released to production.

What was the most important class or training that you took? What was a key technical takeaway?

During my undergraduate studies, I took a Data Structures and Algorithms Design course. That class was instrumental in building my problem solving skills. It taught me how to more effectively organize, store, and solve problems based on inputs of data.

Tell us about your Tech Bytes episode. What message did you want to get across?

In my Tech Bytes episode, I discuss three different topics: communicating changes across separate systems through the Publisher-Subscriber Model; building modular, reusable code, which separates functionality into independent pieces of code; and the importance of Test Driven Development. I hope that viewers learn something new and get inspired to find out more about these subjects — and maybe even use them in a future project.

Check out Kendra’s Tech Bytes episode for more, and explore other interviews on our Tech Bytes YouTube channel. You can also learn more about our efforts to spotlight Black women in tech on the Google’s Women Techmakers website.

Note: For this edition, Jacquelline Fuller is passing the pen to her colleague Hector Mujica, who leads our Economic Opportunity work, to share more about how we approach skill building and recent support from Google.org to honor Hispanic Heritage Month.

One of our goals is to help people — especially those without college degrees — gain the skills they need to pursue in-demand, higher-paying careers. This is a topic that is deeply personal to me, as a Latino in tech, and that is important to Google, as a company that strives to create greater equity and access to opportunity — particularly for underserved communities.

We know that 80% of middle-class jobs in the U.S. require a strong knowledge of digital skills, and that these jobs often pay better. That’s why we partner with nonprofit organizations to help them bring digital skilling solutions to historically underserved and excluded people, like the Latino community. We support organizations like the Hispanic Federation and Per Scholas to use solutions, like the Google Career Certificate and other digital skill training programs, that help job seekers gain the right skills to land jobs in the digital economy. These organizations provide not only training, but also the wraparound support needed to make sure participants can access jobs and success at them.

There’s not a single solution to tackle these economic challenges. In an effort to advance the dialog and create fulfilling opportunities for all, we’re also supporting research to unpack how to best support Latino digital inclusion in the workforce with organizations like Opportunity@Work and Aspen Institute’s Latino and Society Program.

In case you missed it 

To mark Hispanic Heritage Month (which runs September 15-October 15), we’re announcing a $1M grant to the Latino Community Foundation’s Latino Entrepreneur Fund to support Latino micro-entrepreneurs across rural and urban communities in California; and donating $1M+ in ads to participants in a new Latino Founders Fund, helping them reach new audiences and address funding inequities. We’re also supporting Latinos searching for jobs: we announced a $1 million reinvestment in the Hispanic Federation.

For nearly three decades, the UN has been bringing together almost every country on Earth for climate summits called COP, which stands for ‘Conference of the Parties.’ Many believe this year’s summit, COP26, is the world’s best chance to get runaway climate change under control. The UK is asking influential world leaders to bring their plans for real world changes to Glasgow, plans that will help swiftly bring down emissions — from coal to cars to cash — and limit global warming to the 1.5 degree maximum.

But while world leaders gather to discuss their commitments, the people and groups who are fighting for climate action are being showcased. Organized by the UK Government, this is the area where the public, civil society, indigenous peoples, youth groups, charities, academics, artists and businesses can have their voices heard at COP26, through an extensive programme of events, workshops, talks and exhibitions that promote dialogue, awareness, education and commitments.

Visit the COP26 Green Zone on Google Arts & Culture

A new virtual exhibition on the Google Arts & Culture platform will be an exciting part of the Green Zone giving people an insight into what’s happening from wherever they are in the world. It will provide a window into climate action, and the Green Zone, with over 60 multimedia stories showcasing some of the organizations and communities that will be present at COP26.

Inspiring stories

By visiting the Green Zone on Google Arts & Culture, people can discover a wide range of exhibitors and stories. This includes Conservation Volunteers in the UK, who connect people to the green spaces that form a vital part of any happy healthy community. Their teams of dedicated, passionate staff and volunteers work with communities across the UK helping preserve nature, build gardens and grow inclusive and diverse communities. By 2025 they pledge to have planted five million trees.

The “India One” Solar Thermal Power Plant illustrates how the Brahma Kumari community came together to build a solar thermal power plant in Rajasthan. People can learn about this and hear how the project was born by a commitment to living in harmony with nature.

And from all sectors, people are considering what climate action means for them. In the arts, Reimagining Museums for Climate Action is an initiative to explore how a fundamental questioning of what a museum is can make them tools to empower the climate vulnerable.

COP26 has four goals, one of which is adaptation, helping communities to adjust to actual or expected future climates. We know that the most vulnerable are at the greatest risk from climate change, and that they have done the least to cause it. Action to address this and build resilience is needed now, before more people lose their lives or livelihoods. The international community must unite and support people who are most vulnerable to the impacts of the changing climate.

In October 2013, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the province of Bohol, Philippines, causing land subsidence in some of its small island communities. Now, the islands of Batasan, Pangapasan, Ubay and Bilangbilangan in the municipality of Tubigon experience partial or complete flooding even during normal spring tides.

Coming face-to-face with a hundred years’ worth of sea level rise, the island communities have demonstrated great resilience. In 2017, the Racing the King Tide research team filmed a series of micro documentaries which were played to the Local Government Unit in Tubigon in 2018.

These and dozens more stories are available in the COP26 Green Zone on Google Arts & Culture and we are delighted to be sharing them with the world. Climate change affects us all. By opening up the Green Zone to the world with Google, we can all learn more about it, be inspired and moved by stories from around the globe, and gain a greater understanding of the challenges and opportunities for our planet.

Google believes that to have sustainable economic growth, we must have inclusive growth. It is why we developed the Grow with Google digital skills training program, which provides free training to help individuals grow their careers and businesses. Through our digital skilling programs and Google.org grantees, we have helped put nearly 170,000 Americans into new jobs, and of these, 67% are from underrepresented groups, including 44% women. Our Google Career Certificates, available on Coursera, have helped people enter high-growth career fields including Data Analytics, IT Support, Project Management and User Experience Design. Because we believe that collective action is key to success, we created a network of more than 150 companies who accept the Grow with Google Certificates as credentials for roles, including Walmart, Infosys, Verizon and of course, Google (and we are hiring, by the way!).

Today, we’re announcing an expansion of our Google Career Certificates program, including furthering our partnerships with community colleges, translating our Google Career Certificates into college credit and partnering with four-year universities to prepare students for in-demand jobs.

1. Providing community colleges with free access to Google Career Certificates

Community colleges are critical to workforce development and economic mobility, providing accessible education options for millions of Americans and opening doors to opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach. With 44% of American undergraduates attending community colleges, and as the primary institutions serving students from underrepresented groups, there is no doubt they play an invaluable role across the U.S.

Beginning today, the Google Career Certificate program is free for all community colleges and career and technical education (CTE) high schools to add to their curriculum. We will also be partnering with the American Association of Community Colleges, the primary advocacy group for U.S. community colleges and their 12 million students. All of these schools will now be able to onboard this curriculum for free.

2. Translating our Google Career Certificates into college credit

All our Google Career Certificates are now recommended by the American Council on Education for up to 12 college credits (the equivalent to four college courses). For the more than 36 million Americans who have some post-secondary education but no college degree, Google Career Certificates can help provide an affordable on-ramp back to earning their diploma.

3. Partnering with four-year universities to prepare students for in-demand jobs

We are also partnering with four-year universities that are accepting credit for the Google Career Certificates, including Northeastern, Purdue Global, Arizona State University and SUNY, to help increase earning potential and provide students with direct pathways to jobs. For example, a psychology major who acquires data analysis skills can unlock more than 100,000 additional entry-level jobs paying on average $60,000, versus $39,000 for psychology majors overall.

What inspires us to do this work are the real-life stories we hear every day. Like Chelsea Rucker, who was struggling to make ends meet before she took the Google IT Support Certificate through our grantee Goodwill and got a job at Google. Or Natalie Burns, who, while attending community college in Texas, earned her IT certificate and got a job in cybersecurity with a salary three times higher than her previous retail role. These are the stories that drive us, and we will continue to help people develop the digital skills they need to participate in this economy, and gain confidence that they have valuable options for their future.

Citizen journalism is playing a crucial role in helping South African communities unite. Food for Manzi is one organization which tells the untold stories of rural communities and agriculture in South Africa to challenge stereotypes and spread positivity. With support from the Google News Initiative, they set up the Sinelizwi citizen journalism project which trained 62 citizens from all nine Provinces to tell local stories to empower and unite local communities.

Projects like this are why Google invests in the Google News Initiative (GNI), and this week we held the first GNI for Africa event.

The event is an opportunity for journalists, publishers and content creators in Africa to find out more about Google’s training programmes for journalists and news business professionals. From understanding how small and medium size news organizations can grow their digital business to how to use consumer insights and data to better understand reader preferences and increase profitability and engagement, the event brings together experts from Google and the industry to share tools, training and best practices.

The news landscape in Africa is changing fast. In five years, the number of people accessing digital platforms for news content has almost doubled, opening up access to news and supporting a new generation of independent and digital media. Yet not everyone has the opportunity to access digital media, and many more people and communities are not represented in the news. Organizations working to change this, like Pulse in Nigeria, were also part of the event. They spoke about how they have used new digital formats to engage a mass youth audience and developed formats like Explainers to provide additional — and very much needed — context to the flow of information.

At the event, we also announced a partnership with UNESCO to further invest in training for journalists in Africa. Using its networks of established journalism schools, UNESCO will launch a collaborative programme to update journalism education and training programmes run by over 100 expert institutions in Africa, enabling them to better respond to the major changes in journalism and publishing in recent times. This new training initiative will roll out over the next 18 months.

Google is increasing its investment in and support of journalism in Africa, including hiring a News Lab Teaching Fellow who provides locally relevant training for journalists in Southern Africa and programmes such as the Digital Growth Programme andInnovation Challenges which support publishers in their digital transformation. To be part of this training send an email to newslabsupport@google.com.

Watch the sessions from the event on YouTube.

As the days get shorter and colder, it’s getting much harder for us to step out from under our bed covers and into the dark morning. When Daylight Saving Time ends this weekend in Europe and the weekend after in North America, we’ll need to adjust ourselves even more. So, what’s the best way to deal with the new sleeping schedule?

The Nest team spoke to Dr. Logan Schneider who gave us five tips to get your winter sleep schedule ready. Originally a sleep scientist at Stanford Medicine, Logan is now the sleep expert at Google Health. He’s also the brain behind Sleep Sensing on the new Google Nest Hub, the smart screen that helps you get a better night’s sleep.

Start adjusting on time… or don’t adjust at all

That extra hour of sleep this weekend can feel like jet lag for some. Soon, your sleep rhythm might make you want to go to bed earlier than usual. Logan’s advice is to start preparing a few days in advance to make the transition easier for your body. Dr. Logan says: “Rather than shifting your bedtime and wake time by an hour at once, you could try shifting them over four days, so that’s by 15 minutes a day. Start two days before the clocks change, and wrap up two days after.”

The time change can be even more dreadful for kids and their parents. Dr. Logan applies the same principles to kids as above, but makes the night of the time change extra fun: “I allow my kids to wake up 15 minutes later on the Friday before the time change, and again on Saturday morning. On Saturday night, the kids get to stay up an hour later than usual. I make sure we’re watching a movie in a bright light environment, because that helps push the clock a bit later. They wake up at the usual time on Sunday.”

For adults, there might be an even better way: why adjust to the new schedule at all? “You could simply take advantage of being an early bird and just stay on the earlier schedule”, Logan says. Nest Hub with Sleep Sensing can help you monitor your sleep schedule and provide a new bedtime and wake time recommendation after the transition.