The rigid philosophy of testing every little aspect of a Web page's appearance — Mayer's team once tested 41 different shades of blue to determine which generated the optimal number of clicks — has driven away top design talent tired of the endless testing. But perhaps the problem is that Mayer's restive designers just aren't as smart as she is! Here's her explanation:

Every design starts with an instinct: It should look like this, or it should look like that. You can actually test it with data. The humbling thing about that is sometimes the data proves you wrong. So for every change I propose, you know, three out of four, four out of five the data will support the change.

It doesn't matter if Google's ugly — the data is on Mayer's side, see?

Wait a second: Mayer famously dismissed a Googler's application for a job transfer because they'd gotten a single C. "Good students are good at all things," she said at a meeting witnessed by a reporter. But Mayer has just admitted that she gets a C, a B-minus at best, at Web design. She recently touted a design featuring unpopular insurance giant AIG. By her own rules, shouldn't she be fired in favor of someone less tone-deaf on design?

Here's a segment from her appearance:

Since assuming leadership of the consumer web team, I started attending the legendary weekly UI review meeting. I did this both as a representative of the web group, and also to help keep my team on track with what Marissa and her team expected of us. By this point in my career I had worked with her many, many times, and I had been attending the review regularly for a couple of months. She had even shaken my hand once to thank me for launching a particularly big and difficult campaign.
One of the last times I sat in that meeting, as we were dispersing, she looked right at me and asked her assistant to "cut down on the number of guests - there are too many random people here." I knew then that despite all the work I had done for her team, she didn't recognize me at all. I had earned no influence. I stopped going to the reviews after that.
A few weeks later, after thinking about my experiences and opportunities there, I decided to resign.

Halsall then calls for a change in Google's "creative leadership" — a veiled way of asking for Mayer's head on a platter.

Her tale comes after Doug Bowman, Google's top designer, criticized Google's obsession with numbers in making design decisions, a strategy advanced by Mayer. Another former designer, Kevin Fox, now at a startup called FriendFeed, doesn't wholly agree with Bowman — but notes that Google's design group has "had a glass ceiling from the very beginning." That, too, seems like a veiled reference to Mayer's iron grip on the look and feel of Google's consumer Web products. It doesn't take a degree in visual design to notice a pattern here.

Bowman joined Google three years ago — too late, he now says. The company's engineers-first culture was firmly in place, meaning every decision had to be proven through exhaustive testing, rather than a reliance on a clear vision of Google's design. And in a backhanded slam at Google VP Marissa Mayer, the head of "user experience," he notes that top management in charge of design had not background in the field:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.


Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Exciting design problems, like those at Twitter? A source tells us that's where he's going, but Bowman hasn't confirmed that yet. (He promises to disclose his new employer in a followup blog post.)

Bowman adds that he "can't fault Google for this reliance on data," but "won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data." It's a microcosm of what's going wrong at Google: The rigorous culture of making every decision quantitative, every process algorithmic, results in a coldly efficient experience, with no room for the human quirkiness that makes sites like Flickr so appealing. It's hard to argue with Google's financial results. But who wants to work inside the bowels of a perfectly tuned machine? If Google runs by the numbers, it hardly needs humans. And that's why people like Bowman are leaving.

(Photo by gorriti)

Pixel art has long had its adherents. But the use of favicons as symbols for websites in bookmarks and Web browser tabs has turned it into a mass medium. (Gawker's is a square red splotch, harking back to the original Gawker logo designed by Jason Kottke; Valleywag's a green "V".)

Google replaced an older "G" icon with a lowercase blue "g" last summer, to indifferent reaction. The new icon, an Art Deco-inspired outline of a "g" surrounded by Google's signature bright colors, is arguably better than Google's regular logo. But would it work as well if blown up full-size? That's part of the charm of designing with pixels, picking the shade of each bit carefully to play tricks on the eye and create a recognizable symbol.

Michael Pierce has a gallery of favicons, as does Digg designer Daniel Burka. Offer up your favorite micrologos in the comments.

I'm skeptical, because since when are Gmail users looking for a portal to bookmark as their homepage? We heard Yahoo tried to get Facebook to design a widget for the new space on Yahoo's homepage, but that so far Mark Zuckerberg and company have refused. Kind of like how they refused Yahoo's $1 billion offer to buy the company two years ago, relegating Yahoo to redesigns that seem little more than deckchair shuffling on a sinking ship.

As Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer first pointed out, Facebook has removed its applications dropdown menu from the top of the screen and put it down in the bottom-left corner — you know, right where Windows keeps its "Start" button. Just like Windows, alerts pop up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

Microsoft Windows isn't deemed sexy by San Francisco's Web-designer crowd, who brag about having to launch VMware to test out Google Chrome. But, like Facebook, Microsoft has a user base in the nine digits. Zuckerberg shows he hasn't just taken Microsoft's money — he's picked up some of the software giant's mass-market, commonsense design.

"I already have users complain that they can't find apps again on the new profile after first using them. the latest changes will make it even harder," writes one developer. Another: "Yup, this is a very intense change. And pretty useless from a user experience point of view. Hopefully they roll it back immediately or it was just a mistake."

Facebook will ignore this petition, just like it largely ignored users when a far greater percentage of them revolted when the Facebook News Feed came out. Why? Because that feature soon proved to be a crucial and useful element of the site, proving again that while Mark Zuckerberg may not know how to talk to other humans, he knows how people want to use his product better than those people themselves. Even you, Nick Wagner of Laval Catholic High School.

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Wilkinson himself only considers the Googleplex redesign “partially successful.” The Times reports:

Many engineers and the company’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, were not happy with the shock of change, including orange and green carpets, glass workrooms with yurt-like tented fabric roofs to absorb reverberations and “clubhouses” with beanbag chairs for brainstorming that some employees just avoid. “The acoustics in the yurts made people woozy,” said a Google executive who asked to remain anonymous to protect his job. While neither Google nor Mr. Schmidt would comment, Mr. Schmidt, by many accounts, moved out of the building and his large glass office into a tiny but secluded space. “Tour groups and passersby were always rapping on his glass wall to say hi,” said the Google executive. “Eric felt it was unproductive.”

The new face of CNET's flagship site offers a revamped look, more online video, and an easier way for advertisers to customize their messages. The new CNET.com includes a "brand showcase" feature, allowing advertisers to pay for pages where they can promote products with links to CNET reviews, a service for which CBS can charge higher rates, according to Joe Gillespie, who oversees CNET.com.

The new CNET.com highlights another priority for CBS's online strategy: video. A large window that will soon play high-definition video within the homepage promotes the site's video content, including relevant clips from CBS broadcasts. Mr. Gillespie says video ads can sell for double normal ad rates on the site.

If Yahoo's official color is purple, why is the logo it shows to hundreds of millions of users on its homepage red? One explanation Yahoo insiders have given me: In the early days of the Web, purple didn't display well on the available monitors. Since then, an overwrought caution has kept Yahoo from updating it.

The company started testing variations on a new logo two months ago; after trying a different typeface, it appears to have settled on the current version — finally, after 13 years, in the right color.

Tumblr users in Kalamazoo, Michigan:

More in Des Moines, Iowa:

There's one in Muncie, Indiana!

Tumblr users exist where they used to make Goodyear tires in Akron, Ohio:

In East Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they must call the Tumblr-using Sioux Falls kids crybaby emos: