Summary: Google has hired the founder of StopDesign as a Visual Design Lead.
Douglas Bowman, founder of StopDesign, is a renowned web design expert with an enviable web portfolio. He is behind the designs of Lycos, Wired, WebMonkey, HotBot, Google Calendar and Blogger. Google also contracted Stopdesign to create most of their Blogger template designs.
Doug has been associated with Google since a long time as a contractor but recently, he accepted an offer from Google to work as a full time employee. What's more interesting here is that Doug's position "Visual Design Lead" was created especially for Doug.
According to Doug, his responsibilities as a Googler will be:
Source: Google’s best acquisition to date: Doug Bowman
Douglas Bowman, founder of StopDesign, is a renowned web design expert with an enviable web portfolio. He is behind the designs of Lycos, Wired, WebMonkey, HotBot, Google Calendar and Blogger. Google also contracted Stopdesign to create most of their Blogger template designs.
Doug has been associated with Google since a long time as a contractor but recently, he accepted an offer from Google to work as a full time employee. What's more interesting here is that Doug's position "Visual Design Lead" was created especially for Doug.
According to Doug, his responsibilities as a Googler will be:
I’m charged with helping the company establish a common visual language across all their collaborative and communication products. This includes products I’ve already had some hand in like Blogger and Calendar. But it will also include other highly used products like Gmail, Writely, Page Creator, and other projects in the pipeline.This is a good development and you can expect more usable Google interfaces in the future. Doug will probably help Google setup a consistent web design theme across all web application. So the next time you open Writely, you can immediately say - "Hey, that looks like a Google service." I wish Doug gets to apply his brains to the Google Finance portal first.
Source: Google’s best acquisition to date: Doug Bowman