Project Kennedy lifts off

"What might a cohesive vision for Google look like?"

When Page took office, his first directive was clear. "Larry said ‘hey everyone, we’re going to redesign all of our products,’" recalls Jon Wiley, lead designer on Google Search. Wiley and co had just two months to give Google a fresh coat of paint, and to start thinking holistically about how Google as a whole was perceived. "We had a mandate to make this all look good," Wiley says.

It wasn’t the first time that Google’s designers had tried to unify the design language across multiple products, but it would turn out to be the most successful by far. "Historically at Google there were pockets of designers that said ‘let’s bring all of Google together into one beautiful, amazing design,’ but because of the way Google is set up — for speed — […] it was hard for any one team to push that Google-wide," says Wiley. It’s not that there weren’t designers at Google before, it’s just that they weren’t moving in the same direction and they didn’t have as much authority as they needed.

"When I joined Google five years ago, there was no such thing as a common design language for our platform," says Andrey Doronichev, Senior Product Manager for YouTube Mobile, "we always wanted to create beautiful applications, but our priorities were different." A Google-wide design initiative "required the vision of a CEO," says Wiley, "who could rally the entire company to make it happen." Wiley codenamed Google’s new design direction Kennedy — a reference to Page’s now-famous "moon shot" strategy for thinking up new products.

Google’s senior designers gathered to decide how a few design principles would be applied evenly and tastefully to dozens of products used by over a billion people. There was also some "outside help" from Google Creative Lab, as Wiley described in a 2011 talk entitled "Whoa, Google has Designers!" Google Creative Lab is a collection of top-tier designers in the company’s New York offices, mostly known for creating unique and emotionally compelling marketing projects like a tear-jerking Super Bowl ad or the innovative Arcade Fire music video. Page tapped Creative Lab to work with the rest of Google’s designers on creating the new vision. Unlike Apple, Google is willing to work with outside parties on design, and that played a role in the creation of Kennedy. "What might a cohesive vision for Google look like?", Page asked them.

"We had a mandate to make this all look good."

The vision would turn out to focus on on refinement, white space, cleanliness, elasticity, usefulness, and most of all simplicity. "At Google we want to move fast, so a lot of these various products grew up on their own," says Wiley, and so before Kennedy they didn’t abide by one design standard across the board. "We had a lot of simple and useful products," Wiley says, "so we turned our focus towards making these products more beautiful, but also more consistent as a suite of products."

Creating a design vision is the first step, but the product designers had to distill and implement it. "We sat down, locked ourselves in rooms, and we just refined on this design as quickly as we could," Wiley said in 2011, "[we] created these reference set of designs and then set those onto the world through the 'productionizing' of that with the engineering teams."

At the end of June 2011, just under three months after Page took over as CEO, Google shipped fresh new versions of Google Search, Google Maps, and Gmail, and Calendar. In the next year and a half, Google moved swiftly, launching Google Now, a fresh mobile take on Kennedy ideals, and a host of stunning new iOS apps like Google+, YouTube Capture, Chrome, and Maps that followed much of the original vision, albeit with some variations between the different product teams. What was once Brownian Motion, as Wiley describes it, was now a flowing stream of design ideals with forks along the way, but all heading in the same general direction.

Matias Duarte, senior director, Android user experience, put it this way: "Google is going through a design revolution, for lack of a better word."