Google to developers: We're sick of ugly design

Is there a secret Frank Lloyd Wright hiding in your head? Google hopes so, as it begins to push its developers towards a better-designed world.Screenshot by Josh Miller/CNET

Google I/O is fast approaching, but before the massive developers confab descends on San Francisco in June, the Internet giant wants its acolytes to think hard about design.

Google on Tuesday announced that the conference was open for developer registration through April 18, and the themes of the company's annual conference, to be held June 25 and 26 at the Moscone Center West. The emphasis will be on designing, developing, and distributing, wrote Billy Rutledge, director of developer relations in a blog post.

The goal, he said, is to help developers "build and prove your app from start to finish."

The high-level push to make its services and products simple and aesthetically pleasing is a relatively new one at the Googleplex, but one that has gained traction in recent years. Driven by the stripped-down design of Google Now's "cards" display, many of Google's existing services have begun to refresh their look with bigger fonts and less cluttered displays of data including YouTube, Gmail, Google+, Hangouts, Google Drive, and Google Maps.

But the company also has focused on making its presentation of hardware more appealing. Love it or hate it, Google Glass is inarguably simple in its look, as is the Chromecast streaming media stick, theNexus 5 phones, and the second edition of the Nexus 7 from last year's Google I/O. Google recent purchase of Nest reflects those concerns over design as well, as the Internet-connected thermostat company received many accolades for its attention to detail and design.

"At Google I/O this year, we will have sessions and workshops focused on design, geared for designers and developers who are interested in design," said Google staff designer and evangelist Nadya Direkova in a separate blog post.

"When Google launched, it was a crisp white page with a simple search box. You might not have thought there was much in the way of design, but its appearance underscored two of our most important principles: simplicity and usefulness," she wrote.

While it's true that the Google Search page always has been minimalist, that can't be said for the original versions of many other Google services. That's changed. Google's efforts to make design aesthetics part of the developers' workflow reflect its own efforts to make design appealing, a sign that the 800-pound gorillas of the Internet are forcing their developers to mature along with them.