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Graphic design seems to finally be getting some deserved attention from businesses these days and design-related salaries are steadily rising, however I can’t help but wonder what the overall perception of graphic design is from the general public. Good design can sell a product by consumers recognizing it as so. Products are more about style and what they say about their owner these days, rather than solely about the job it performs or the service it offers. This has led consumers to place certain products/companies on a cultural pedestal (people NEED their iPods). In the same way, consumers influence design by setting the bar on how it’s quality is measured.
There is an abundance of bad design in the professional world that is widely accepted and it is leading consumers to lower their design standards. This is one of the reasons the iPod absolutely exploded and became a cultural phenomenon. No other mp3 player at the time offered such ease of use AND looked amazing doing it. I’m getting a little sidetracked, but the point is that I decided to do a little experiment to see where most people are being exposed to graphic design and what quality of design is readily available to their eyes.
Where do most people go to find answers and resources on any topic? Google, of course. I simply did a Google image search for the phrase “graphic design” and observed and compared which images were displayed. What I found was that because the results are based only on relation to the phrase, and the fact that any site can include itself in Google image searches, the results included many insignificant, useless and poor representations of “graphic design”. Of course most designers do not use Google image search for any kind of inspiration, but the general public certainly uses it as a reference.
If Google wants to help its users and provide them with the best results, they should consider implementing some new filtering and sorting options. They’ve made a good start by introducing Google Image Labeler, which allows users to label images, but this only helps with the keyword and phrase relevance of the images. Here are a few ideas that take it a step further…
1. Distinguish original images from representations or photocopies (image of an image on a book, etc.)
2. Exclude or separate navigation and header images, unless the phrase includes those specifics
3. Include a rating system that includes multiple categories such as RELATION, IMAGE QUALITY and an OVERALL user rating, and allow users to rate and sort by these categories
When I ask, “Is Google Giving Design A Bad Name?”, I don’t mean the site itself is a representation of bad design. It’s clean and simple look is one of the reasons it stood out from Yahoo!’s and MSN’s cluttered home pages. I think it’s well-designed for its purpose as a search engine, but as a graphic designer I have to be concerned about how my field is being represented and perceived on such a popular research tool as Google. It’s influence in cultural and historical perception is such that it can mold public opinion very easily.
Because graphic design and its related fields are based mostly on visuals, it is certainly influenced by Google image search. What else can artists and designers do to control public perception in the Google arena when it is already controlled by so many of its users? Try searching for your specific field and look over the images that pop up. Are you comfortable with these images as a representation of your livelihood?
March 25th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
I agree with the representation being poor. You make a great point and should sell your idea to Google!
March 28th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Thanks, Julia. I’m sure I’ll be bought out by Google before I’m able sell anything to them first.
April 5th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
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April 11th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Yes, I agree with Julia that you should exchange your idea with google I hope they will must consider you. Good Work, Keep it up!
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April 11th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Throughout, you’re solving a problem that you think might exist, but that you haven’t actually encountered. You haven’t actually tried to search for information about “graphic design”, seen Google’s search results, and thought worse of the field, nor have you seen anyone do so. You’re not going to convince me that Google should make _major_ changes to the entire index of image search because there might be some users who never learned basic information literacy concepts.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Dave, you make a good point. However, I have experienced clients trying to find their own graphics by using google image search and the top results they found based on their search criteria was poor. While they obviously were not searching for the correct terms as you suggest, do you feel that the general public knows the best terms to search for? I am using “graphic design” as a generic term, because that is all that the image results are based on… a few words.
If google image search is going to be anything more than simply an index of all the images on the web, and want to supply their users with the highest quality results that are actually helpful, they need to implement more criteria. They have already begun to do so with the image labeler, which was not a major change to introduce for a company who has given us applications such as Google Earth and Sky.
April 14th, 2008 at 5:01 am
To fully understand this problem, it’s probably worth understand how Google actually indexes information. It has a very specific algorithm (along with spiders etc) that does the magic. But when it comes to images it cant actually “see” what it’s dealing with unlike it can with text. It has to rely on additional info.
The onus isnt on google search to make images as accurate to the search field as much possible, it’s not that smart(it isn’t an AI after all!) - it is the responsibility of the content owners to ensure that the images they are hosting are contextually correct.
Very simple things like adding an ALT tag to an image to provide a description make a ton of difference in searches.
April 14th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Thank you, Azeem, for explaining the indexing and making it more clear to me. It certainly seems to be more of a content owner and user issue, rather than a google problem.
I guess the best thing to do is to educate designers and developers about correct markup and hope that beginners follow it as well. I am certainly still learning how to better my css markup.
June 7th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
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June 19th, 2008 at 6:31 am
[…] comment on TechCrunch: “Google has a design team?” More on that here and here. I’m sorely tempted to write about how Google’s designs are so Web 1.0 (now trying to be Web […]