Find Guidelines - The fastest way to brand assets. 9 | A Rare Peek At The Guidelines That Dictate Google's Graphic Design. In April 2011, Larry Page took the reins as Google’s CEO. He didn’t waste any time getting down to business. On his very first day on the job, Page launched an incredibly ambitious effort to redesign the company’s main products, including search, maps, and mail. He wanted them to be beautiful--Google had never been known for its visual polish--but he also wanted them to be cohesive, more like a true software suite than a jumble of disparate digital tools.
In the years since, Google’s products have improved leaps and bounds, aesthetically speaking, largely while working within the same shared design language. Here’s how they’re doing it. The rare glimpse into the company’s design process comes in the form of two documents--"Visual Assets guidelines"--freshly shared on Behance. The more exciting of the two covers product icons. Google encourages its designers to take a "reductive approach" to product icons. The next few parts deal with perspective. These are small, dry details. Google Visual Assets Guidelines - Part 2 on Behance. Google’s brand is shaped in many ways; one of which is through maintaining the visual coherence of our visual assets. In January 2012, expanding on the new iconography style started by Creative Lab, we began creating this solid, yet flexible, set of guidelines that have been helping Google’s designers and vendors to produce high quality work that helps strengthen Google’s identity.
What you see here is a visual summary of the guidelines, divided into two Behance projects: Part 2: User interface icons and Illustrations Google design style: Executive Creative Director: Chris WigginsGraphic Designers: Jesse Kaczmarek, Nicholas Jitkoff, Jonathan Lee, Andy Gugel, Alex Griendling, Christopher Bettig, Jefferson Cheng, Roger Oddone, Yan Yan, Zachary Gibson Guideline design: Google Visual Assets Guidelines - Part 1 on Behance. Google’s brand is shaped in many ways; one of which is through maintaining the visual coherence of our visual assets. In January 2012, expanding on the new iconography style started by Creative Lab, we began creating this solid, yet flexible, set of guidelines that have been helping Google’s designers and vendors to produce high quality work that helps strengthen Google’s identity.
What you see here is a visual summary of the guidelines, divided into two Behance projects: Google design style: Executive Creative Director: Chris Wiggins Graphic Designers: Jesse Kaczmarek, Nicholas Jitkoff, Jonathan Lee, Andy Gugel, Alex Griendling, Christopher Bettig, Jefferson Cheng, Roger Oddone, Yan Yan, Zachary Gibson Guideline design: Art Director / Team Manager: Christopher BettigSenior Graphic Designer / Project lead: Roger OddoneDesigners: Alex Griendling, Christopher Bettig, Jefferson Cheng, Roger Oddone, Yan Yan, Zachary GibsonContributors: Web Studio, Brand Team, Creative Lab. The Secret Law of Page Harmony. “A method to produce the perfect book.” The perfect book. This is how designer-genius Jan Tschichold described this system.
Not the ok book, nor the pretty good book, but the perfect book. This method existed long before the computer, the printing press and even a defined measuring unit. No picas or points, no inches or millimeters. It can be used with nothing more than a straight edge, a piece of paper and a pencil. And you can still use it. The Secret Canon & Page Harmony Books were once a luxury only the richest could afford and would take months of work to be brought to fruition. And they were harmoniously beautiful. The bookmakers knew the secret to the perfect book. So elegant is this method of producing harmony that a few designers saw to rediscover it. They found the way to design a harmonious page. There’s a dance to all this Let’s look at this dance, shall we? This is where the harmony is found. How is this dance beautiful? A module is to a grid, as a cell is to a table. The J.