Cultural Osmosis and Hyperfixation on Getting Everything Right
What Happens When Your Work is Owned by Megacorps
This post, like most things in my career, is an experiment.
In the span of fifteen years, I’ve moved through my share of corporate jobs – sometimes as a contractor, other times as a consultant. The contractor role at Google was full time work on an hourly wage. Contracting at Apple was funneled through an agency who created a small company to staff Apple’s MarCom department.
Facebook
Designing posters for Facebook was my first freelance design job.
From 2015 to 2017, we did a series of projects together for their research department, often centering on synthesis and data distribution in an engaging way. By the hands of another team, the visual language of my initial poster series for Facebook became the famously redesigned Instagram logo in 2016.
This design style – mesh gradients with intense colors that somehow stay calm and grounded – was years ahead of its time. Fast forward nearly ten years, and mesh gradients are ubiquitous. Ian Spalter and the Instagram creative team designed the logo. Given how sprawling the Facebook company was at the time, I’ve always chalked it up to a happy accident.
When Instagram announced their redesigned logo, my partner at the time, also a designer, pointed it out to me. “Isn’t this your work?” he asked. Pulling up the Illustrator file, we debated the similarities and differences.
Google
From 2017-2019, I spent most of my waking hours at Google HQ in Mountain View. Starting as a UX designer, I became a visual design lead on the company’s most profitable consumer AI surfaces: TV. In the spring of 2019, I rolled onto a new project: visual language and product design for a voice-assisted driving mode.
I won’t deep dive on the nuances of voice-assisted UI in this article. My Google work is documented here here and here. The intention is to show you the work that ultimately led to Gemini’s branding.
Fast forward
Every six months or so I'll catch a glimpse of a Google ad. Blinking twice, my work is floating around in the world. I’ll be honest. It's always going to be weird to see my exact work remixed by new teams and launched 5+ years later.
In a world where designers have full access to archives, and are encouraged to borrow what’s been shelved, it’s more than a little validating to see my actual work in the world. Given the the deep library of process files, production files, and visual files I generously left, IP that Google now owns, I’m glad to see it in the light of day.
I feel fairly sure that this one is a 1:1 from my design files. If not, then two designers had the same idea with the same color palette. All possible paths to truth! I find seamless patterns to be remarkable.
One final note on this work is that Google is notoriously safe with branding. When I presented this gradient, the C-suite overidentified with pink and blue as gendered colors, so we toned it down.
Kudos to the team who got this live for Gemini! No easy feat.
So what?
The punchline is that being an innovative designer makes it hard to pin down when your ideas belong to the collective. Micheal Beirut famously says that being a famous designer is like being a famous electrician. In the cases I shared above, it feels like I installed hardware, someone else tighten the screws, then they claimed all the work as theirs.
At this point, it’s just part of my lore. I want people to know I was in the room, too. As long as the lights work, who cares who installed them?