A Web Designer to the Backbone

Plumrocket Inc. is starting a series of posts about famous web designers. Design itself is an art form. And design in the Web is a powerful tool which needs a skillful master to start working. Today we want to tell you about Doug Bowman who used to be Google’s Visual Design Lead. More than two years ago he left the company to join Twitter..

Why? Let’s find out…

Douglas Bowman emerged in web design in late 1990s. In 1998 he founded Stopdesign – a small graphic design consultancy where he conducted a freelance business still working for Wired. In 2002 he left Wired and totally dedicated his attention to Stopdesign. His successful projects were not left unnoticed and in 2006 he joined Google. Mr.Bowman was the first “classically trained” designer who had been invited to work for Google. Perhaps, this was the reason why he decided to quit the corporation three years later.

In his blog, he explained his decision saying that “without a person at the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. … A company filled with engineers is bound to reduce each decision to a simple logic problem”

He mentioned that there was a time when a team at Google had been testing 41 shades of blue to see which one performed better.

The web designer went on telling that ‘he could not operate in an environment like that’ and wanted to meet new challenges and opportunities in solving even more exciting design problems in this world.

Now this passionate web designer is the Creative Director at Twitter. He could not stand over-reliance on testing which flourished in the team of Google’s search products & user experience analysts. What is more important for the almighty Web – pure design or high traffic – that is a question of philosophy.

Doug Bowman, the philosopher of design, has made his choice…