How Google designs its brand

Google is one of the biggest brands around. It increasingly believes that design plays a vital role in building its brand. And design, for Google, means not so much what its logo looks like, as what its user experience feels like.

Explore this site, which sets out guidelines for the engineers who develop Google products. It helps them designing their product’s user interface in the style of the Google brand.

This style uses ‘flat graphics’, the current fashion - as opposed to graphics that are designed to look three-dimensional, and to mimic the look of physical objects, an approach called ‘skeuomorphism’.

How well do you think this style helps build the Google brand? How helpful do you think these guidelines are?