Design and the Google brain | Hacker News Reader

Design and the Google brain

blog.fawny.org

23 pointsherdrick7 comments

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.

(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.)

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.

> the Googler embarks on a full-scale jihad against the very concept of taste

I say: this is all based on prejudice, not on knowledge, and the author should have refrained from posting such a bullish article.

Compare this diatribe to Linus Torvalds which often uses taste as judgement for code quality. It seems like some designers have a very narrow definition of 'taste' which only includes their own subject, and not a real understanding of art in multiple field.

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

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.

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.

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