I suspect that this is why Apple continues to thrive. It's very opinionated. One guy at the top is making huge sweeping decisions that wouldn't fly in a committee.

I love that Apple decided to ship a cell phone missing a stack of features because they knew they had what was REALLY important to the user already in there. And that they spent time getting the little things right (like nice transitions, and a unified look and feel) rather than add more features.

"Test driven design certainly has a huge place on the web — but it has to coexist with opinionated design. Otherwise you’re just giving the user what they think they need."

Actually, it's not that at all. If you're basing on how people react, it's not what they "think they need", you're basing decisions on actual behaviour. Adam, you're thinking of user research.

For example, I work with customers all of the time and design their web application interfaces, and the "interaction design." I spend a lot of time working on the information that needs to be presented, and exploring various ways to make pages easier to use. To me, that's design.

"Or, as Joe Clark more bluntly put it in his post Google Smothers Designers, “[t]his is, after all, a place where usability head Irene Au recapitulates her own math nerds and derides typography as something twee designers fiddle with to make pages “breathe.”… Welcome, Irene Au, to the title of Worst Enemy of Web Design.”"

That's awful. Typography is the largest part of the average web site. Text takes up more space than anything. It's worthy of extensive focus.

How significant are the designer departures? How many designers does Google have?

If Doug Bowman says the culture at Google sucks for designers they are going to have a hard time recruiting great designers - his word has a lot of weight in the design world.

That surely is an overkill. Why do they have to decide between 41 shade of just blue? Instead they could have had a hackday kind of event and asked the designers to come up with his/her own designs based on a basic layout and then combine the best features (and colors maybe) of each design.

So now they back tracked on their original decision which was based on opinion and instead use the one that actually has good data behind it and wound up making them millions upon millions more. Sometimes they'll restrain colors to stay within a theme knowng that the best they'll get is a local maxima, but when you've got the number of users that Google does, it makes sense to try 41 shades of blue, because you'll sometimes find that just a handful significantly outperform the others, and the probability of you having picked them as a designer with no testing or data is pretty small.

Designers hate how Google does things, but the results speak for themself... The methods used work really well.

Should you cater to the lowest common denominator and be the Microsoft of the web, or try to do the Best Thing and have a smaller market share but of much higher taste and disposable income, aka the Apple ?

And do you really think there's a socio-economic divide along the lines of blue vs. yellow text ads? Because that's pretty ridiculous.

Who loses here, besides the person who thinks yellow is "bad design?" Your customers have the final say, not the designer.

It's horrible to read.

Google was founded by two computer scientists, helmed by a former electrical engineer, and stacked to the rafters with mathematicians and statisticians. Their original investors were exactly the same types.

Can anyone think of another type of firm that fits this general description? That's right people - hedge funds!

Can you imagine a visual designer walking into a hedge fund and expecting free creative reign? It's absolutely naive. They were working for a bunch of quants and numbers people that are turning the online advertisement industry into a derivatives trading market.

Read that last sentence again.

Google is Wall St. West without suits or ties, I don't know why more people don't understand this better. They're blinded by bright colors I guess.

That is a good way to put it. But, I doubt most people think of Google in that way, including engineers.

You can bet the people calling the shots at Google are thinking of it that way.