I agree, it's totally outrageous that people with "backgrounds in sociology and political philosophy" are preying on our most vulnerable global corporations and infiltrating their most sensitive and secret labor camps!
Labor camps?! the fuck! they are being paid regular salary.
The author doesn't quite understand the concept of social injustice (nor do you) and so he tries to apply it on patterns he'd found with disastrous consequences.
He thinks that if you're gonna give your employees Google type perks you have to give these to everyone who steps inside the plex?! security personnel and cleaning ladies?! contract workers?! that doesn't make sense. Google engineers get these perks to be happy and make cool stuff, manual workers get a paycheck! that how the world works, that is why people go to college.
Giving everyone these perks would hugely increase operation costs.
This whole post and the attention it’s getting don't make any sense.
News flash: not all employees get paid the same and not everyone is the CEO.
But do you realize that the security personnel, cleaning ladies, and contract workers [your classes of employees] do get the perks?
Just the special contractors with their golden badges don't.
It absolutely does have an affect on the bottom line. How much do you think it costs to feed an employee for a year? On top of the gourmet cafes, don't forget that an employee is never 50 from food throughout the day. Now multiply by the 25,000 employees. You'll get a number that is very big even for a company of Google's size.
Interestingly, if you say this in a "oh noes, my spam ads got pulled from Google and they won't talk to me on the phone!" thread, you get downmodded to oblivion.
You're missing the point. Google has this manual monotonous task of scanning millions of books, so they choose the company that offers the most cost effective workforce, paychecks and launch breaks are taken care of by the contractor Google hires as they don't pay those workers directly.
As a designer, I'm not very concerned about spec work. The wide availability of cheap desktop publishing software could have made design as a profession vanish because it gave people the ability to do it themselves.
But that didn't happen. Instead, people did try it themselves and the market was flooded with extremely poor design. Before, not having a logo at all was the floor, the absolute minimum of branding. But after DTP, the floor was raised - having a poorly-designed logo that you did yourself was the new minimum. Today, crowdsourced logo that you paid $300 for is rapidly becoming the new minimum.
Nothing changes for designers, because there is no ceiling. Thinking of design in the very narrow, branding sense: it cannot be commodified, because whenever the minimum level is raised, it becomes ubiquitous and generic, and that creates the new zero point. Designers get paid to design things to stand out from what's ubiquitous, whatever that happens to be at the time.
It's OK as a logo, except for the inconsistent light source on the shadows. As a toolbar icon, it seems like they decided to redesign it so that it violates every OS icon guideline in existence, except on Windows Phone 7.
"Many designers or agencies might scoff at the notion of a “non-designer” being able to learn and understand the principles to help them arrive at a design."
They would, except that most of them were once non-designers who learned the principles of design. That is how you become a designer.
Or maybe he means non-designers can learn how to design by reading a book? Yeah, I guess designers would scoff at that - reading helps, but you really have to practice to be any good.
I agree. I finished "The Non-Designer's Design Book," which seems to be universally regarded as the sine qua non of beginning design; then immediately applied my new skills to a redesign of my dad's 1998-frontpage-website. Long story short, after about 8 hours of work on the homepage, it still doesn't look much better.
