8 Smart Ideas for Overhauling Google’s Homepage | WIRED

It’s hard enough to get a group of friends to pull off a potluck, yet when members of the after-hours creative group The Letter Society congregate, they manage to take on ambitious tasks like redesigning Google’s homepage.

Each month, this group of designers, who met in college and have held down gigs at motion graphics powerhouse Imaginary Forces, ad agency Leo Burnett, Procter & Gamble, and digital agency Razorfish, choose a subject ripe for a redesign and offer up their creative visions. This month, the team turned their talents towards Google’s search box. “I decided that because we had not done a web-focused project that I would throw us into the deep end by trying to reimagine the most iconic website on the internet,” says Erik Wagner, a member of the society and originator of this project.

Anything that deviates runs the risk of appearing tone deaf.

Redesigning Google’s homepage is a more difficult challenge than it seems. The search giant is known for its spartan starting screen so anything that deviates from that runs the risk of appearing tone deaf. On the plus side, Google’s passion for data driven “design”–whereby 41 colors of blue will be mercilessly A/B tested–has left plenty of white space open to the designers.

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