Doug Bowman says “Goodbye Google”
March 21st, 2009 by noelperlasIronically, I saw this link on top of Gmail: “Wired Top Stories – Google’s Data Culture Drives Designer Crazy, and Out.” Of course I had to click on it. It turns out that Stopdesign founder Douglas Bowman is leaving Google as its Visual Design Lead. According to his blog at stopdesign, he had “grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions” like whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide:
When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
I have heard similar stories of designers, some of whom I know personally, that work inside big corporations having similar gloomy outlooks. I cannot clam to know how that might feel like… but I guess it would suck. But personally I think Doug has to see his contributions, no matter how minuscule, as world changing. He helped designed Google Calendar… now, can you imagine how the world would be without the great work he put into it?
Posted in Seen, Tech, Web Design |
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2 Responses to “Doug Bowman says “Goodbye Google””
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Dwight Says:
June 24th, 2009 at 11:49 pmFrom the way he talks, he seems like a smart guy. Although I think design needs a certain amount of data to work with, a lot of times, too much information from people who do not share the same vision as the designer will just prolong and even destroy the design tasks at hand.
In our country on the other hand, it works differently. It’s not the influx of data that’s making it difficult to work as designers; rather, it’s the lack of it. Philippine culture relies too much on subjective decisions and everyone(even your mother) has a say on design considerations that they really shouldn’t meddle with.
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noelperlas Says:
June 24th, 2009 at 11:54 pmThanks for posting, I like your insight. I agree, Filipinos are very intuition driven, subjective rather than objective. Lack of data sometimes, but I also think too much dependence on data is ridiculous. Off tangent, I think we can compare this to German design, although very precise, may come off as too cold as compared to say the expressive work of Italian design.
