Monday, June 05, 2006

GOOGLE LOOKS TO SPIFF UP ITS DESIGN

Don't look now, but Douglas Bowman is joining Google as ``visual design lead.''

Bowman's work includes a redesign of the Wired News site a few years ago. More recently, he punched up some of the templates for Blogger, and apparently helped with Google Calendar.

It'll be interesting to see what influence Bowman has over Google products. It's a company that's never really been known for its design sensibility -- fairly or not.

Bowman notes on his blog a very cool Google Calendar feature that lets you get a daily agenda of your appointments via SMS whenever you need it. Very nice.

Bowman said he would be helping Google establish a ``common visual language'' across all its products including Gmail, Writely, Page Creator and other projects in the pipeline.

See and read some of Bowman's work and interviews.

[courtesy of the San Jose Mercury News]