About.google
Most people visit a company's home page to learn about it. Google's home page is its flagship product, built for searching, not for explaining. So we created a new page and domain, About.google, to tell the story people were actually looking for.
Google is the company behind Search, Android, Chrome, and hundreds of other products used by billions of people. This is one of two case studies from Google Brand Studio, Google's internal brand experience team. The other is Google Photos.
About.google is where Google explains itself to the public: who it is, what it builds, and what it stands for. The old page was a directory of links. We rebuilt it as an editorial site, with a story carousel, the latest from the blog, films, doodles, and the live Trends screensaver, all held together by a single design system. Because the page had no dedicated team to maintain it, live social, blog, and Trends feeds kept it fresh on its own.
I was a primary designer on About.google and designed it through launch, working as an individual contributor embedded on-site with Google's in-house team. I worked under a creative director, shaped the copy with the VP of brand, and built it with three PMs and two engineers. Design reviews ran all the way up to Sundar Pichai.
- Editorial design through launch
- The shared design system across pages
- Internationalization for ten launch markets
- Design assets for every language and region
- Editorial copy and story
About.google sat within Marketing Design System & Communication, one of Google Brand Studio's four initiatives, telling Google's stories for the company and its hundreds of products. Brand Studio and its four initiatives are covered in the Google Photos case study.
Every day, millions of people come to About.google to ask the questions Google.com was never built to answer.
- 01 What does Google stand for? Our story & values
- 02 What products does it make? Our products
- 03 What is it like to work there? Working at Google
- 04 How do I get a job at Google? Careers
- 05 What is Google up to now? What we're up to · blog
From a directory of links to a living story
The old page asked you to navigate. The redesign tells you something: it leads with editorial, gives Google's products room to breathe, and keeps the page current with live modules so it never feels like a static brochure.
One scroll, the whole company
Top to bottom: what we're up to, the latest from the blog, the live Trends grid, behind the scenes, a doodle from today in history, the social feed, and values in action. Scroll the full page below.
One structure, from the company page to a single article
Section pages, a product directory, and full-bleed editorial overlays all share the same structure: one grid, one type scale, and one way of using photography. Here it is across four pages.
Knowing what to leave out
Several pages were designed but didn't make the launch. One was a management page with executive bios and headshots. We cut it: a page of leadership portraits didn't feel very Googley. The site read stronger leading with products and stories than with an org chart.
The same story, recomposed for mobile
The Trends tiles stack, the carousel becomes a swipe, and an article runs as one clean column, without losing the editorial feel.
The strategy outlasted the pixels
About.google is still Google's front door. The visuals and the stories have moved on many times since 2016, but the core bet has held: a dedicated home, separate from the search box, that tells the company's story and keeps itself fresh. And the boundary has only blurred since: with AI, Google itself no longer just searches, it explains and gives context, the very thing About.google was built to do.