

Design and the Google brain - herdrick
http://blog.fawny.org/2009/04/26/google-neuroanatomy/

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rantfoil
Wow, talk about drinking massive hater-ade against Google engineers. I think
this is little more than a poorly reasoned diatribe / ad-hominem attack
against the perceived Googleplex.

Come on now -- Google has smart engineers who get design. Yes, it's probably a
damn hard place to get great design done, but so is Microsoft and every large
organization. To attribute the exodus of designers to an aspergian mass of
engineers is insulting and does nothing to bring a together a dialogue between
engineers and designers.

In my opinion, it's probably the size of the organization and NOT any Google-
brainedness. Design is a difficult and massively opinionated thing to
undertake. The more cooks in the kitchen, the worse the soup tastes. Everybody
knows that.

~~~
litewulf
(Anecdote time: I'm at Google in a team full of engineers. We spend meetings
arguing about the UI. We defer to people who actually get paid to think about
UI when it comes to these situations. I'm sure it varies from team to team.)

~~~
SwellJoe
I think it's incredibly clear to anyone with half an ounce of design sense
that Google has _fantastic_ design. It isn't _pretty_ design...but it is
design that functions better than almost anything it competes with. GMail is a
dramatically better mail client than anything else out there. Search,
obviously, is the perfect example of stay out of the way design. iGoogle maybe
isn't perfect, but it works as well as anything else I've tried. Google Reader
is a solid effort.

This article is talking about design as art, lone visionaries with exciting
new ideas. Google is design as function and usability and using proven design
principles to deliver products that work in obvious ways, that also happen to
look good. I strongly prefer the latter, and I think the market strongly
prefers the latter. There are many beautiful failures on the web (and
amusingly, many of them have been celebrated on design sites). Google is a
good looking (though not often beautiful) success.

------
HSO
I'd be interested in how the process at Apple compares. Does anyone know of
credible references/interviews on the web?

~~~
rantfoil
My cofounder spent 6 years at Apple-- they do it by just doing it with fewer
people. It's astonishing how much work gets done with such small teams.

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etherael
This kind of mustered venom typically indicates a deep seated fear on the part
of the complainant, and it isn't hard to imagine how this might be the case in
this particular example. Imagine something you thought was more important than
anything else was being sidelined in preference to something like the cited
massive test based design? I imagine priestly castes often have the same kind
of reaction to hard science which exposes the lies of their particular brand
of theology. Of course they fight, this should not be a headline, but it is a
foregone conclusion that they lose in the end. You can no better argue a
subjective position with objective reality than you can indignantly disagree
with gravity/call Newton aspergian and hope to survive a long walk off a short
cliff. If a hundred thousand people like shade 35 of blue and design dogma
says you should instead use shade 15 and only a thousand people prefer that
shade, design dogma is simply wrong. Ah well, natural selection will kill this
type, sooner or later.

