Apparently, Google is only getting started deploying the new design

Oct 14, 2011 18:21 GMT  ·  By

By now, it's impossible that you missed Google's massive redesign. It's the biggest in the company's history, the first time it attempted to have an unified design across all products, and, actually, the first time Google has focused on the looks rather than practicality in history.

Any attempt this big is going to have problems and the massive redesign has plenty. The one-size-fits-all approach is hard to make work across the many different products Google has.

It's also hard for a company that focused on utilitarian design for so long to start thinking about the aesthetics for a change. Given that, Google is doing quite all right.

When Google first announced that it was going to revamp all of its products, people didn't really know what to think of it.

The fact that Google started to deploy it almost at the same time it launched Google+, which is pretty much the first product to use the new design, added to the confusion. But the fact that it was the first was only a coincidence.

People were wondering why would Google make such a massive shift in its philosophy and the only thing that came to mind was Larry Page, which had just taken over as CEO at the time.

Turns out, as Google Operating System notes, that the redesign was Larry Page's idea. He wanted Google to be beautiful and elegant, as opposed to only practical.

What's more, the fact that the same design elements will be used for all products is in line with his 'focus' strategy.

He believes Google needs to become more focused on big products and technologies and he's killed off quite a lot of underperforming projects to do this.

It's no surprise then that he's lauded the redesign effort in his conference call after announcing Q3 financial performance.

"The new visual redesign--beautiful, consistent UIs for search, news, maps, translate and lots of other features. It’s only the beginning of that process!," he said.

The design which is now being deployed across more sites is the work of the Google Creative Labs, the ones behind Google's Super Bowl ad and many Chrome ads.