Your Business Needs Quality Design

Experienced web designers can tell amateur design by many marks. Observing heavy, thoughtless drop shadows and harsh inner bevels is perhaps the easiest. Google knowingly sported both for 12 years.

Google’s home page is legendary for its simplicity. The recent arrival of the new search results page, and other visual and functional enhancements, is accompanied by my favourite Google move yet. Google Docs is great. Google Earth? Super cool. But finally updating the worst logo to ever emblemize a company not headquartered in a car? Brilliant.

There is enough written on the Google logo, mostly nostalgic “how did it come to be?” puff. Apparently Sergey Brin – an engineer – designed it using GIMP. That makes a lot of sense, but I’m unable to find who made it so terrible to look at. Presumably Sergey picked a type face and some colors (and added an exclamation mark to mock Yahoo!)  But did he have help? Was it he who stumbled upon the drop shadow and inner bevel filters?

Google is an outlier. The terrible logo was probably such an appreciated inside joke that the sentimentality indeed outweighed a change. Designers need not apply. “The Google logo is storied albeit ugly, and perfect as it is.” Would Google have lost anything if were to have taken its face seriously and relieved this eyesore so many years ago? It doesn’t matter; there is only one Google.

Most companies don’t have this luxury. Especially small companies need to look their best and invest in design. The subconscious pull toward one seemingly identical product over another is up to design. Consumers imagine their buying habits informed and unemotional. But the legitimization of your brand is in its marketing, seen long before the prospect chooses to engage. Which business would you call?

This entry was posted by Justin Nedecky on Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 9:51 am and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.