Why Can’t Google Design?

Google—the search engine—has been praised for its radical simplicity.

But click on the “more Google products” page and it suggests an entirely different design ethos.

What you see above is just a tiny sample of Google’s motley collection of product icons, most of which wouldn’t pass muster in a freshman-level graphic design course.

The icons appear to be crowdsourced on one of those $99 sites without regard to creating a design system—or a contemporary design aesthetic.

Perhaps that’s the real reason Steve Jobs hates Eric Schmidt: He doesn’t want Google’s ugly design messing up Apple’s products.

Update on Tue, March 9, 2010 at 08:48AM by Frank J. Oswald

HEY, MAYBE I’M ON TO SOMETHING. Just read two articles: One that says the new iPad won’t ship with a calculator, because Jobs didn’t like the way it looked. And another that says that Apple would rather pay fines than disfigure its U.K. stores with government-mandated “no smoking” signs.