I have said it before and will say it again, Google cannot ‘visually’ design a damn thing. Android is ugly as all hell. The Gmail skins make me want to vomit. The Google front page is still circa 1996, hell even the browser favicon symbol is dog butt ugly. Don’t even get me started on that damn logo. I am not stating anything here that any Graphic Designer doesn’t already know, so I will save the rant.

But today, a friend sent me a nice article today that gives good insight into how the code trolls run the design show at Google (which I very well suspected). Douglas Bowman (a former Wired designer) writes all about his struggle as Google’s former Visual Design Leader.

It will never cease to amaze me how Google, will all this dreamland-dot-com style money still cannot get together design wise. They might be onto something here, but I am not buying it…

I always give Google tons of crap, because I cannot comprehend how a company who at one time had stocks steadily in the $500 range, can have such ugly products. I mean, they have adult slides, guitar hero rooms, and endless insanity in their posh offices that make the .com offices of late 90′s look modest. But yet, they cannot hire a descent design team? I mean, seriously, gmail, calendar, all these web apps are FUGLY. It is easily noticeable how they were coded, then they “polished the turd” with some quick CSS and called it a wrap. If I am wrong on this process, then that makes the overall design even that much more lame.

So, I was happy to see Google actually commissioned a custom face for Android. The face is called Droid and was created over 2 tears by a company called Ascender Corporation. The face looks pretty nice, especially once you know the project briefing Ascender was given – ‘They wanted to see a range of styles, from the typical, bubbly Google image to something very techno-looking,’

Now, a company who has a rainbow inner bevel logo, to get a font like this as a middle ground on their idea, I think is a damn sweet deal. Now, too bad they didn’t spend that much time on the actual Android interface. That interface makes Windows 95 look like solid gold. Common Google, hire some damn designers. Wait, let me rephrase that, hire some GOOD designers.