Google has never been known for their design prowess. But over the years, there&'s no denying that they&'ve made even google.com look significantly better with logo, button, and even search box upgrades. Now it looks like the basic top nav bar may be getting a fresh coat of paint as well.

As you can see in the images below, Google is currently testing a new-look nav bar that replaces the standard blue underlined links with a much better looking, but subtle, toolbar. Your place in the navigation is now not only indicated by the darkening and bolding of the text, but also by a colorful band across the top of you position. For example, in the images you can see the blue bar on top of the &''Web&'' area indicating you&'re in a web search.

On the far right side you&'ll notice a nice big &''Sign in&'' button (with a subtle yellow bar on top of it), and a new settings icon next to that.

It&'s not a huge change, but it&'s a nice-looking one. Google has confirmed that they&'re testing it but will only say the typical:

At any given time we are running 50-200 search experiments. You can learn more about search experiments on our blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html

I suspect this experiment is one that will see the light of day on google.com at some point in the future.

(Click on the images to enlarge)

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Old:

[thanks Ted]