How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
articles.latimes.com
How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
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Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
#2I can picture it, Marissa as employee nr. 20. "I really want to try this design thing". "Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code". Then, with Google's success, the design became a success, which in turn lead Marissa to a star designer - without much other merits.
No?
Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
#3I'm not entirely convinced "Google" and "design" belong in the same sentence, unless we're talking about their original no-frills homepage and search results, before adwords and instant and live preview.
Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
#4I'm not entirely convinced "Google" and "design" belong in the same sentence, unless we're talking about their original no-frills homepage and search results, before adwords and instant and live preview.
I'm confused, are you implying that Google does not design their various products?
Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
#5I'm not entirely convinced "Google" and "design" belong in the same sentence, unless we're talking about their original no-frills homepage and search results, before adwords and instant and live preview.
I'm confused, are you implying that Google does not design their various products?
More that their design in the past 4-5 years (both visual and "user experience") is very bad. It also does not seem to be practiced in the traditional way (based entirely from reading blog posts and with no first-hand experience with how they do things).
Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
#6I can picture it, Marissa as employee nr. 20. "I really want to try this design thing". "Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code". Then, with Google's success, the design became a success, which in turn lead Marissa to a star designer - without much other merits. No?
Marissa did plenty of coding, enough that ten years later, we're still finding bugs in her code. ;-)
I think it was more that in a fledgling startup filled with smart, opinionated people, everyone wanted to do design, and Marissa actually proved to be good at it.
Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused, are you implying that Google does not design their various products?
More that their design in the past 4-5 years (both visual and "user experience") is very bad. It also does not seem to be practiced in the traditional way (based entirely from reading blog posts and with no first-hand experience with how they do things).
Google design statistically, like evolution, except the variations being tested are not random (well, maybe some might be).
I would disagree with you that their products are not well designed. Of course they have many products, but the majority that I use are a step above their competitors.
Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confused, are you implying that Google does not design their various products?
More that their design in the past 4-5 years (both visual and "user experience") is very bad. It also does not seem to be practiced in the traditional way (based entirely from reading blog posts and with no first-hand experience with how they do things).
It's a mixed bag. For example, I thought Chrome was very well designed.
Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
#9I can picture it, Marissa as employee nr. 20. "I really want to try this design thing". "Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code". Then, with Google's success, the design became a success, which in turn lead Marissa to a star designer - without much other merits. No?
Marissa did plenty of coding, enough that ten years later, we're still finding bugs in her code. ;-) I think it was more that in a fledgling startup filled with smart, opinionated people, everyone wanted to do design, and Marissa actually proved to be good at it.
... Marissa actually proved to be good at it.
Except that, as far as I can tell from the vast majority of Google's products, Google (perhaps not Marissa?) has a design sense that ranges from "poor" to "incredibly poor". Chrome, perhaps, being a singularly notable exception.
Re: How I Made It: Marissa Mayer, Google's champion of innovation and design
#10I can picture it, Marissa as employee nr. 20. "I really want to try this design thing". "Okay, you can do the page layout, while we code". Then, with Google's success, the design became a success, which in turn lead Marissa to a star designer - without much other merits. No?
Or perhaps her skills and sense of design were what was needed at the time and things went well. If she was useless apart from one good decision there's very little chance they'd give her anything meaningful to do. She's been working on the products that seem most important there so I sorta doubt your theory.