Finally, a “visual design lead” for Google

This will probably only matter to web design geeks, but Douglas Bowman is joining Google as “visual design lead.” We’ve long admired Bowman’s work, including his redesign of the Wired News site a few years ago. More recently, he punched up some of the templates for Blogger, and apparently helped with Google Calendar. It’ll be interesting to see what influence Bowman has over Google products. It’s a company that’s never really been known for its design sensability – fairly or not.

(An aside: Bowman notes on his blog a very cool Google Calendar feature that lets you get a daily agenda of your appointments via SMS whenever you need it. Very nice.)