In 2019 I became a part of Google Developer Studios.
Billed as Google’s internal production studio Google Developer Studios (GDS) is an essential part of Google’s developer outreach, creating educational content with the goal of expanding accessibility and growing user bases across all of Google’s brands. At GDS I was tasked with a massive variety of design tasks, from show production, storyboarding, illustrations, animations to web design elements and diagram design standards for internal and SaaS uses.
Google Developer Studios - Animation
Cloud Bytes
Cloud Bytes is a series developed to explain the various cloud products in under a minute. It’s a fast-paced quickly turned around project including 20+ videos made starting around 2020. Often several episodes would be worked on at the same time, and asset management was essential to complete.
Discovering Data Centers
Discovering Data Centers is a series requested by the Google Cloud engineering leads who wished to showcase the various details of how data centers at Google worked, with a feature on the many ecological and green-energy based solutions the newest data centers were implementing globally.
The 6 episode series took approximately 6 months to complete, with each episode ranging in the 8 minute range. The biggest challenge was finding the right balance between information density and visual narrative flow.
Google Developer Studios - Icons
(solution architecture system)
Visibility & accessibility
Architecture diagrams are a collection of icons and structures that assist in providing a visual explanation for complex software and hardware systems. They are very info-dense, and absolutely essential in explaining to programmers how their systems function. They however have one discrete limitation of visibility.
Identifying the challenge
These diagrams often appear in many of the productions that GDS creates. Often hundreds of videos a year need a method to convey this information without losing the developers who are watching.
To further complicate things, 75% of ALL video views were coming from cell phones.
I had to develop a functional system for showing structures and hierarchies that not only conveyed the information, but did so within the confines of smaller screens, and with higher contrast ratios to comply with WCAG 2.0 standards.
Build & test
It was essential to build the system as robust as possible, with clear color and branding to best accommodate for the wide varieties of architectures that GDS worked with. Once enough A/B testing with new users were achieved, the work began to adapt to various brands like Firebase, Flutter and Android with custom icon sets, specific colorways, and even font packs that aligned with branding updates as time passed.
Making critical information visible to all
Over a dozen shows utilized this system, and that resulted in developing multiple variants for specific use-cases. Often videos would have cut-out sections for the host. There were a set of slides meant to increase all elements by a ratio that would maintain the minimum type size for smaller screens.