Douglas Bowman Steps Down From Google, Leaves Blog Post About Company’s Dependence On Numbers

Douglas Bowman joined Google when it was about 7 years old, 3 years ago.  He worked at Google as a designer and was given the chance to assemble a team of Visual Designers.  Bowman said that he will be stepping down earlier this week and will announce what he plans to do in the future in the next part of his blog post.

Bowman was Google’s first visual designer and the problem was that none of the designers in the company had high positions in the company.

“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,” wrote Bowman.

Bowman recently debated over whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide and had to prove his case.  Bowman said he couldn’t operate in an environment where minuscule design decisions had to be constantly justified when there are many other exciting design problems out there to take on.

[via StopDesign]

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