14 DAY TRIAL // About the time Google+ launched, Google also made another big announcement, a company wide redesign, starting with the search engine. That redesign is still being rolled out to all Google products and still being updated and tweaked.
Several Googlers, who worked on the project from day one, were at the SXSW conference and talked about how the redesign came about and similar large scale plans going as far back as 2007.
In January last year, just as Larry Page announced that he would take the reigns of the company, the soon-to-be CEO contacted Gmail's Michael Leggett to ask him about a Google-wide redesign.
The project was picked up by Google's Creative Lab which came up with a look it dubbed "straw man," the basis of the Google design that was rolled out to users a few months later.
As soon as Larry Page became CEO, he approved the redesign and the team raced to have it done by the end of the summer. The project was dubbed Kennedy, in reference to US president Kennedy's pledge in 1961 to have a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
They did it even faster, with a revamped Google Search coming out in late June, on the same day Google+ was revealed.
Since then, the redesign has been taking over Google, one product at a time, while at the same time being updated and modified.
But it could have happened four years earlier, the Googlers revealed, in 2007 a team within Google came up with Kanna, Icelandic for explore, examine or investigate, a project to roll out a company-wide redesign. The team actually came up with something like four different design ideas, which may be part of the reason why then CEO Eric Schmidt and other execs decided to reject the idea.