[lbo-talk] The extreme Google brain

Charles Turner vze26m98 at optonline.net
Wed Apr 29 05:58:05 PDT 2009


On Apr 28, 2009, at 5:46 PM, Chuck Grimes wrote:


> Well, this blog over Google and Bowman explains it perfectly. Not
> the brain thing, but the inability of the cyber culture to grasp the
> first thing about visual design.

Hi Chuck-

I read the piece over at Bowman's blog that I think you're talking about, and it seems inconclusive at best, and most probably self- serving. Sounds like that "classically trained designer" ;-) got nostalgic for the innovative, wild west days of HotWired, and wanted to go back to venture capital funded projects.

His story about the 41-odd shades of blue make an appeal to our knee- jerk belief that big corporations can't do anything "spontaneously." User interface design for an application like Google Calendar is pretty involved, and goes through quite a few design stages. Bowman leaves the impression that Google was noodling with his conceptual sketches, when it's far more likely that they were testing that blue fairly late in design development. Computer monitors vary widely in their color rendition, and it would be responsible of Google to find out which shade of blue was actually most visible on a wide array of screens, right?


> Art ultimately doesn't fit anywhere, mostly because it takes too
> much time to learn and get good at ... time is money... and good
> design, like good code costs extra time and extra money.

Well, I wouldn't use "art" and "design" interchangeably; they're two different beasts. Certainly there is a lot of good design out there, although perhaps you want everything to have the "flair" of an "innovative" (ha!) company like Apple.

I think the big problem with design today is that it's competing against the trends unleashed by the Open Source movement. Before, design could go through an in-house quality-assurance process, and a company was on the hook for a completely "designed" product. It's much more common today to put raw, untested stuff out in the market and let the "users" debug the thing for free.

Best, Charles



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