news.cnet.com— Douglas Bowman, Google's visual design leader, is leaving the company after finding the company's reliance on detailed Web page performance data too confining.
Mar 20, 2009View in Crawl 4
In the past I've worked for an agency for a major technical school - and it took them 5 months of committees to decide on a lapel pin design. So his opinions are completely justifiable to me - it's nearly impossible to get anything interesting out of an environment like that. Corporations should just let designers do their jobs, they certainly wouldn't let us do theirs.
The job of the designer is to make an interface that doesn't suck. The people who design those annoying sites aren't true designers and failed at their job. Designers understand things like the grid system, the color theory, and how to organize content. They are experts at it but programmers sometimes think they know better, which isn't true.
If sharing data was left to engineers, you'll be reading digg in a VT100 Console with a function key cheat sheet. F5 to digg F6 to submit comment. The net would consume 70% less carbon and the suicide rate worldwide would be quite high, which, in the end, would solve urban sprawl, efficiently, and on schedule
In serious, I would say if it were left to engineers stuff would be a lot more plain but probably not that much different; After all, engineers have a lot to do with the way pages are presented from the serverside, so I doubt that really would change the progression of the web's as much as to say it would never change method-of-access.To make a more specific example, If CSS was designed purely by designers, then it would probably be a lot f**king easier.
Closed AccountMar 21, 2009
In the past I've worked for an agency for a major technical school - and it took them 5 months of committees to decide on a lapel pin design. So his opinions are completely justifiable to me - it's nearly impossible to get anything interesting out of an environment like that. Corporations should just let designers do their jobs, they certainly wouldn't let us do theirs.
stealthspcMar 21, 2009
The job of the designer is to make an interface that doesn't suck. The people who design those annoying sites aren't true designers and failed at their job. Designers understand things like the grid system, the color theory, and how to organize content. They are experts at it but programmers sometimes think they know better, which isn't true.
defectdsMar 21, 2009
Product design ≠ Visual web design.
cabazorroMar 21, 2009
If sharing data was left to engineers, you'll be reading digg in a VT100 Console with a function key cheat sheet. F5 to digg F6 to submit comment. The net would consume 70% less carbon and the suicide rate worldwide would be quite high, which, in the end, would solve urban sprawl, efficiently, and on schedule
mrviklundMar 21, 2009
This is a lame Cnet dupe article. Digg and read the original post. Don't give them free traffic.<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/tech_news/Goodbye_Google_4" rel="nofollow">http://digg.com/tech_news/Goodbye_Google_4</a>Buried.
squarewheelMar 22, 2009
Getting dugg down makes you feel better and me feel worse. =[
Closed AccountMar 22, 2009
Have you used Gmail? iGoogle? Google Earth? There are a LOT of design decisions.
Closed AccountMar 22, 2009
In serious, I would say if it were left to engineers stuff would be a lot more plain but probably not that much different; After all, engineers have a lot to do with the way pages are presented from the serverside, so I doubt that really would change the progression of the web's as much as to say it would never change method-of-access.To make a more specific example, If CSS was designed purely by designers, then it would probably be a lot f**king easier.
dillingersmoothMar 23, 2009
he should go work for facebook. with all their recent design changes it doesn't seem like they use any data to make changes