# Code, Creativity, Performance: Will Larche, Engineering Manager, Google

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Google Design
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLQ8vnjggys
- **Дата:** 22.10.2024
- **Длительность:** 43:57
- **Просмотры:** 1,297
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/47579

## Описание

Find new episodes on your favorite platform: https://design-notes.show

This season's special series  celebrating ten years since the launch of Material Design continues with Software Engineering Manager and Musical Theater Writer  Will Larche, who talks about his path to become an engineering manager at Google. Larche, a self-proclaimed “design fan,” describes engineering as “creativity with constraints.” Here, he explains how the development of Material over the years has led to closer collaboration between design and engineering, and imagines how new AI experiments might open up a new era of “Star Trek design.”

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

design notes is a show about creative work and what it teaches us I'm your host Liam spin each episode I talk with people from unique creative fields to discover what inspires and unites us in our practice this season I'm starting with a special series that celebrates 10 years since the launch of material design exploring the Inception Evolution and future of Google's design system in this episode I sat down with software engineering manager and musical theater writer will larsh in the interview will explained to me what makes software engineering a study of choices where the creativity lies in encoding design and how he imagines that AI experiments could open up an abstract new future for the interface let's get started will welcome to design notes thank you Liam I'm so excited to be here finally I mean you took your sweet time making me a guest didn't you but I appreciate that you wanted it to be the biggest hit that it possibly could be before you even approached my people and that's kind right this is long overdue and this is part of the reason that I'm loving the M10 campaign so far because it does give me an excuse to reach out to Will's people and finally get some of my favorite co-workers on the show I will admit there are some people that are wondering what happened to M4 through 9 but we'll explain we'll make it make don't worry about it uh okay he will for the listeners who don't already know who are you and what are you working on you know I ask myself that every day Liam uh I am will L I am an engineering manager here at Google I am uh now the lead in Google design platform for AI for designers and developers okay as soon as you say that there are going to be people wondering what that means so I manage Global cross functional teams that attract and retain users to the Google ecosystem through improving its look and feel and save the company money by increasing the productivity efficiency and creativity of designers and developers through the application of large language models to common problems I want to know first of all about the journey that led you there from the beginning how what beginning birth where are we going you should start where you see the start it started for me when I joined a Buddhist Meditation group in the West Village um called friends of the western Buddhist order now called TR ratna and uh their leader did it for a Georgian economic publisher if you're not familiar with Georgian economic theory I'm not here to espouse it or or you know promote it but it's a it's a theory of taxes based on property owning instead of income and he was going on vacation and knew that I was kind of like computer literate like growing up in the 90s you had to learn how to take care of a computer you couldn't just have one that worked that was not the goal of the companies that were making computers back then it was more like a fun hobby that you were always building your computer and he said can you come in twice a week and restart the printer for the bookkeeper I was like yeah can do that and so then uh I did that and he sent me this message while he was away saying we need to change the copy on the website for the charity and I was like okay I'll try that and I went into Dream Weaver if everybody remembers Dream Weaver um I believe you can get me through the night um it was a simple task change a sentence on a website I could not do it I could not figure out how to do it I did a poor job it made me mad I went home I was super upset and I said maybe I'm blaming Dream Weaver maybe the real person to blame is will because will didn't know anything about this and I said if I knew about this if I understood what I was doing would I like this and the answer was yes I was pretty sure that I really would like working with you know website as I thought at the time and so then I decided to get some education I ended up taking a class at a NYU night school called intro to see which was like what's a compiler and how do you use the plus and minus operators uh and from there I talked my way into an internship telling them I wanted to be an iOS Developer because iPhones were new at the time and I was super excited about how nice they were and how beautiful they were I wanted to make apps and I wanted to understand it I got that internship it turned into a job I then got another job I Rose at

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that startup to head of mobile development um then I ended up becoming a VP of engineering somewhere transferred around to a lot of other startups and agencies I was Chief product officer and mobile lead at one at the same time that Google was reaching out to me and I said no Google I'm not interested I don't know why You' think I'd want to work for you I had no interest in being a cog in a machine but then my startup closed and I said Hey Google let's talk and then I actually turned down several teams that were interested in uh having me work on them because they just didn't feel right and then they said well have you heard of material design and I said when I was managing designers back at that startup I didn't really know what I was doing but I had one that created her first mobile designs ever and they didn't really work they didn't make any sense and I had seen material design come about these external guidelines and I said to her look at these and see if they could help give you some knowledge or inspiration she did 2 Days Later Gorgeous mobile designs that were usable and buildable that turned into our product so I had already seen the power of material design to help someone like fundamentally and change essentially the path of a product from being uh-oh to wow so yeah I was excited to work on material design I came in as an iOS engineer and mobile and motion expert and then I ended up founding our flutter team I ran that for years I ended up running our color team and our color space the HCT color space material color utilities uh our work in personalization and then um my engineering director asked me to start uh an AI initiative and that's turned into a bit of a thing I've also built figma plug-in tooling I think I sent you a list of all the things that I've worked on it's actually a lot I think for for one person I bounced around but always within design engineering here at Google to be honest I didn't even need the list I feel like the stuff that you've done has had such a big impact on the team and by extension like all the people building with material that it's like impossible not to know the list so kind so something between flutter the HCT color space working on figma tooling um also this perspective that you have about making things more efficient for the people who are making software something that I really want to ask about is the creative nature of making software from an engineering perspective because your work intersects so often with design and I'm curious like what your perspective is on the relationship between those two things it's really weird so engineering is the study of choices we have the thing we need to build and there's 10 to 100 different ways to do it and some of them are obvious more off on guard you know hey you want to go write everything in you know machine code fine or you can use the newest framework that hasn't been battle tested yet but you have a good feeling about those are the choices that Engineers have to make every day so there's something creative to that and then once we've made our choices we sit down and we write so it's very much like being a novelist or some other kind of writer except that there's a right answer in the end that you can write whatever you want but it is always supposed to do something that's been predetermined we've got requirements we have a spec we have designs maybe if we're doing front-end work and it's supposed to look like that and go like that so there's all this creativity towards a constraint which I find very different from visual design when I watch you all work I've often seen you all do projects where it's like hey what's next where it's literally just like we should be thinking about the future and you know what does that mean and then you know karening one of my favorite designers goes I'm really interested in mycelium the roots of mushrooms right now and people go wow and then that turns into Sparkles and material 3 and stuff like that like it's a totally weird process where you all don't have a right answer you have to just create and do stuff and it's very open-ended and that's a little intimidating to me that's why I consider myself not at all a designer in any way but a design fan I am here because I love what you all do so much and I want to make it come true for the user I don't want to give them a high quality experience because of the amazing idea that you all have the

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magic that you pull out of the air okay a couple interesting things there first Karen is absolutely right everyone should be paying more attention to my celium yes and second it's interesting to hear your perspective on that because I always think about you know when I talk to people of all kinds of different creative disciplines I'm thinking about like what is the material that they have to work with how do they manipulate it and what are the constraints that are placed on it and I think for me even talking about some of this like visioning work or like discovering a new Vibe or you know coming to some conclusion about how the interface should work in the future even there like it seems a little bit more clear to me but I I'm really interested in this comparison you made between writing code and writing a novel like how do the materials and the constraints work together when you're you've made your choices about how you're going to approach it and now you're writing and then what happens well you are making the assumption that we've made our choices and I think most of the time that's true sometimes there's just pure exploratory software engineering but often times it's about the fun of it so I guess you know knowing what I know about all the Arts you're manipulating whatever you have either until it does the thing that it's supposed to do or it gives the feeling which I assume is what probably doing in the visual arts right is that you just have this intuition and feeling that it's done right yeah cuz that's what happens in my music and my theater work too is I which I haven't mentioned yet but this is all um a part of a big ruse for me to be able to do um queer and avanguard Music Theater um in the East Village it's very expensive and so thank you Google for supporting me um it's difficult sometimes because it can seem like a sea of I don't know what to do and it could be anything um but and then I've also run into where I've made stuff and people are like why don't you just keep it that's good enough and I'm like I don't know how to tell you that it's wrong still this still isn't the right thing and I need to tear it down and build it again and it can be very frustrating for other people to see a writer do that um so engineering has an appeal to me in the sense that I live in this world in the Arts that's total ambiguity and is so difficult and then I can come into work and there is a right answer but still requires some creativity on our side I think as time goes by in the industry and there's more constraints based off of resourcing and you know uh we're not just in hypergrowth mode anymore we do actually expect people to make more choices ahead of time and to go ahead and build the thing quote unquote the right way the first time but I'm smart enough as a manager to know that there is no such thing as the right way we need to revisit things we need to do postmortem on work all the time we need to refactor we need to build in time to change things um and then align that to when business priority shift so that we're making the next version of the thing when it can also have a difference for the user and so as a manager I'm often trying to enable my people to be able to do their creative work to learn from it and to improve things while also intersecting that with what the business needs yeah there's an interesting recognition there that like what is the right thing is so contingent on the rest of the context around it in Engineering in design certainly in writing if I'm writing something and I'm working on a draft over multiple days and then I come back I can definitely tell what mood I was in when I was last working on it there's also this phenomenon in engineering where every engineer thinks the other engineer is wrong it's very weird and I think that's a function of our human brains where if one Engineers working on something large they'll spend so much time putting themselves into it and like I said dealing with thousands of choices every single thing that they decide to write the way that they name a variable to whether or not they're using an if statement or a switch you know sometimes these things are predetermined but most of the time it's up to the engineer to decide these are the very personal pieces of engineering that then when somebody else comes in it's like when you're in somebody else's house and you might most of the time feel like oh I love this house but I would do it different you know like not that rug you know that sort of thing Engineers have the same problem where even if they like something they're like well I would have done it differently and I think one of the mistakes engineers make is thinking that feeling is truth that has to be followed all the time instead of finding a way to learn more from other people the best Engineers are the ones that are willing to um look at what's going on learn from it and then figure

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out what they would do next not what would they would have just done in the past I mean that's useful in a postmortem or something um but most of the time we're trying to move forward yeah it's interesting to make the comparison to like how someone has decorated their house because at least um for myself I certainly think of code as something more objective than design so it's to hear like how big a part of it actually is like the subjective input of the person writing it and all these small decisions that I feel like in design I really have to be conscious about keeping up with that so that at the end I can understand and also convey that context to someone else in a way that it makes sense it's definitely underappreciated how much is um the million little choices inside the code and how the person who was writing it felt that it was beautiful or still hat did what they were working on um I don't know if designers run into this but I think most people when they're working on things can be like I hate this but I have to move forward sometimes that's actually when you do your best work though is when you have to accept um that you couldn't get something to totally please you or to make it perfect but then you were able to ship and have an impact yeah disappointment can be focusing uh yeah and you know what disappointments played a very big role in my life I'll tell you that much do you want to talk about that no I don't Liam that's very personal why would you even bring it up I and on the on the house decorating thing though you've been to my house you know how I go I'm always aiming for says I'm such a fan of design but I don't have any talent for it so I hire really great designers and tell them to go nuts and I the kind of feeling that I want is someone walking into my house and going oh wow that's a little much that's great that's me right I'm glad my husband feels the same way it's a good spot to aim for I want to go back I don't want to brush under the rug all the stuff that you were saying about your work in musical theater and writing I've been in the audience at some of your shows um I want to talk a little bit about that and I also want to talk about how like the interplay between that and the work that you do day toay what does that feel like for you well it feels like I'm acting like an engineer I deal with my psychoanalyst he always tries to tell me like do you feel like you're performing yes I do all the time doesn't mean I'm disingenuous it just means that I do feel like there's a heightened sense of being aware of how others are perceiving you that is very valuable if you can wield it and I think one of the reasons why I've had exactly the kind of trajectory career that I've had is because I'm willing to bring personality and a curiosity about people and empathy and essentially you know my performative skills to something that can be kind of dry you know software engineering can be a little bit like hey just leave them alone let them go stay in their room don't bother them what I really want is for people to understand each other and to always come at whatever's going on with a maybe attitude whenever designers product people marketers whatever come to an the engineer needs to say maybe listen to it evaluate it and give them the time to see that it might still be no but like don't start with no that's such a way for good ideas to get lost and for um amazing things to never get built unfortunately but it is like kind of like this tradition in software engineering that we're crusty and that we put up a front that tells people um leave me alone mhm we actually do our best work that way we do our most self-indulgent work that way because then we are just writing for ourselves but there's there with are collaborators there's clients and there's end users and all those people are the responsibility of the engineer as well yeah and I think design and Engineering have shared goals around those audiences and I also think like we are all in one of the best positions we can be in to make these things possible I think um what do you mean meaning that you know we are in a position at Google working on material design lots more resources than and you know certainly any of my previous jobs uh to find the solution I think if we can't find it here I don't know if it can be found I'm going to just agree with you I think we have far more constraints these days than we appreciate one of the things that's been on my mind a lot lately is why is that and how can we fix it because we do have this responsibility

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to make sure that with 200,000 people working for us we're doing great work and moving fast and we have this way that we've worked for the past 20 years of building shared infrastructure like material components and like the many things that we have internally that run our backends and our front ends and I would just like the people on the outside to know that like engineering inside Google is completely different than it is anywhere else because we have custom shared infrastructure and every time somebody builds something like that any little thing that we're building that's supposed to be shared we're making this promise that we're going to help the teams that are using it move faster but I think it's actually worth asking the question as to whether or not they do if we want to change something we end up breaking somebody else's application that's doing it or we have to talk to a hundred different teams and sell them on what we want to do and what if only some of them do and then we have to align with more people it becomes harder and harder to move forward every day there's also this tension in material design between are we building blocks or are we creative Direction and we've kind of always agreed that we're both or somebody actually when we started when right before I started here like when earlier teams were releasing the first material there wasn't components at all it was no building blocks it was just creative Direction and we changed the world that way but then people kept saying like well you want me to have a button that looks like this give it to me and it seemed reasonable and my team when I started on the iOS team here it was actually people inside the company building a button being like hey I'm on maps and I built this button would you like to use it on search and then somebody being like yeah put that somewhere where I can copy it and then that turned into a directory of material components that people had made and then material was like should we help with that and people were like yeah it seems reasonable that we should help with that and then over time it became creative Direction can't change without the component being ready and we release these things together and people keep asking for that that's what they expect but it might be that that's still missing the mark in some way in being able to um bring true Innovation and I wonder what it would look like if we had a separate team for Creative Direction and building blocks and the building blocks were really good at being flexible and they could build custom UI much more easily because secret even in like a material app only 40% of the UI is like material and then the rest is customed to the content of that application and so I think that in a better world we would separate these things and if we had components they would be so flexible and divorced from their styling that we could change them at any time so we really should be building things in a way that they're so flexible that we are indemnified for a future we cannot see instead of um calcifying the spec of today into components that are difficult to change yeah and I do want to talk more explicitly about yeah where material was when you joined and where it is now and how we got there but I do think there's a really good point there that uh we kind of progressed from or emerged from a sort of collaborative like fast moving chaotic way of assembling designs into something highly systematized in which like our concept and perhaps others concept of how to implement a design system was along these very objective lines of like components that look exactly right the shadow values are exactly how they should be the size the typography everything great um and that now we're kind of moving with relational color and all of those things into a space where we're trying to find a way within those boundaries to as you said like communicate the creative direction or communicate more of a mood more of the subjective quality of the design and potentially facing a future where we have to build those flexible components that maybe we should have built from the beginning but I want to talk a little bit more about kind of how you've seen that progression from where you started in concrete terms and then we can extend into the future well I think the biggest change was it used to be designers were just making guidance and then everything else hopefully happened so this was kind of this upside down world where design was completely in charge they were still you know not having a good collaboration with engineering as is so often the case but in a when the design system is the

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product they could just go and do and I think that's kind of rare like I can't think of many other products where the engineering is second maybe or not the most important thing the components were not always seen as necessary it was our clients that told us they were necessary because it wasn't going to come true for most of them unless we supplied components because that became the pattern and it seemed like I said this sort of reasonable expectation that we should always have components that match the guidelines So eventually we got to this point where they would tell us that the guidelines were changing or had changed and then we got to this point where we said hey stop releasing guidelines until the engineering is ready and then these things kind of became they marched in lock step um again what sort of happened under the hood that was more difficult is the engineering is then the blocker not for being built but for being shipped because we have you know hundreds of clients with inside our own company much less on the outside and every time you change something people complain they've maybe customized it in some way and you didn't know it and then they're like hey I was using this button as a date picker and now it's not working and you'd be like oh well at Google we have this idea of a mono repo which is one place where our code is stored and it would be our responsibility to resolve that problem even though somebody was kind of using off-script behavior and would same thing would happen on the outside where people would be like give us the next material we're so desperate for us why are you holding it back why are you so slow but then if we did it in a way that we were changing what they had an even larger contingent of people would come forward and say you just broke my app I did not ask for material 3 my app doesn't even look like material 2 but I built it off of material 2 to do this other weird stuff and since we had done it in this way that wasn't really built for flexibility or flexibility was kind of always something that was just kind of figured out locally that then it became impossible to move forward that way and I think that tension between our rebuilding blocks are recreative Direction that's the sort of largest the largest conflict that I see still going on inside material design some people think we still don't have enough people to really even do what we're trying to do which is to power the entire expression of Google brand through software as well as enable people in Android to do the same thing for all of their brands or to use a built-in Baseline that they can theme on and addition so on top of that creative direction to also just be how you build apps to like standardize that we are the button we are the text field and that sort of thing and each of those components is a tiny application that's huge some of them are huge I worked on textfield on iOS it's I once printed it out because somebody was like I don't think you're technical enough to get to the promotion you want and I was like hold my beer and then I went and printed out all the code I had written for textfield had it bound and dropped it in his lap and said I've written this much code did you know that they didn't because they thought it was just textfield and I was like this is what it takes to do a text field it's ridiculous and that was even back in the day when I don't even think I did my best work or we had the same standards that we do now where it would be even better even stronger now for looking and exactly like the way it was um material was scrappier back in the day too I mean like I said it started with I made some code can you share it and maintain it sure we can do that for you to um my first project was actually building the io app for some reason we were like okay let's do that now we're like no we do not have time to work on the I we're we power the whole world you know a front end in many ways so it's been quite a journey and I'm still very proud of some of the things that have come through Dynamic Color user selected contrast the HCT color space I think those are the greatest things that I've touched here because they are truly Innovative under the hood they use some of the most um you know bleeding edge technology for dealing with the color and they brought new Concepts that hadn't existed before in order to personalize UI and every bit of research that we have shows that people want personalized experiences and that's what Google's known for right we personalize your search results we're going to be personalizing your UI more I think that's what my AI team is going to be working on yeah and I mean people who have followed me on my Google Journey know that I was saying years before I joined this company that this was the place best position to realize a vision

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of true adaptive design and I really see these making these subsystems relational in a way that abstracts them and allows them to respond to like unpredictable conditions is how we reach that future and I also want you to ask yourself like why haven't we reached the future already right like it's Google is gigantic why have we still not gotten to a fully adaptive um software for all of the things it's because it's still expensive I mean we can make helper code to help people get a tablet design but then Gmail or whoever these giant applications have to sit and design it and make it and they have their own constraints and their own concerns I think it's good for us showing people a way to move forward but then they need to kind of like take it on board and then apply it to their thing I'm thinking about the dimensionality of the interface that we're talking about two dimensions something behind glass that you can't even physically touch and how you work more complexity into that system at a level of abstraction that's appropriate for millions or billions of people yeah when I started on iOS it was about how do we make this look like the real thing the skew morphism of it all was so much fun for engineers to work on and I hope designers too you'd be like this is a podcast app so it's got to look like a podcast studio with the microphone and all these sorts of things um I miss the fun of that but I don't miss the look of that if that makes sense but I have to say it's interesting to me to think back on that now because I Think metaphor has been at the heart of translating interface into a 2d screen since the beginning and it's no coincidence that like the first creative conceit for a desktop interface was called a desktop um and I wonder I can't help but think that that's going to re-enter the picture at some point that the level of complexity and personalization that we're talking about will have to take on a quality that helps people understand these concepts by referencing something that they already know here I guess was the conceit of material I yes it was and that was really cool although um I think we actually did help ourselves by expanding that universe a little bit and stopping to be so literal about the material paper um but I see in the future where this is going to come into play working on the AI design team we're working with teams like bespoke which is this team that um has been featured on um in Gemini's uh kind of like press about how we can build designs at runtime that are completely bespoke to the user take this to an inth degree where you're seeing a UI that has been sending you experiments for years to figure out exactly what you like and exactly what you need because everybody also has very different usability issues one of the things that we learned here is that some things like wag are actually constraining and not taking into account the fact that there's huge diversity in usability needs inside the world but we could begin serving that to you we could figure out through your usage exactly what you need and build you a UI that looks nothing like mine your experience with an application the same application could end up becoming strange and weird and take into account the um indeterminacy of llm work you know turning up the temperature if you want to see something that's AV on guard almost but works for you and so we could end up with Concepts that we don't even have yet that the computer tried out that then we could codify into guidance that we could use in other places because if something works for another person it could be a good experiment for somebody else this is why I came to Google and then ask yourself what is the value of the design system in that world as we March towards that the design system is going to sure we're going to start with just where are the components on the page then we're going to start to well is it these components is design guidance about patterns usability creative Direction and expressing brand so that people still have a Halo feeling of Google um made me feel happy and so I care about it while I'm doing something that's pink and completely different from other people and are Design Systems going to look the same way that they do in the future would they maybe for an enduser product like um an external company but not for um Android or Chrome or something like there's kind of like these huge possibilities that Design Systems blow up a little bit and change

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that if we give control over to the computer to begin making design decisions then we have to just think about how we're guiding the computer and not guiding other designers necessarily who knows I mean this is all theoretical right now fun experiments are happening and it would have to be proven that it has value but it's a great thought experiment to just think about like if I took away components what is the design system I think also about UI from science fiction like from Star Tre Next Generation and they had touch screens with all this stuff and all those beautiful sort of like Jewel tone colors and how I think on purpose it looked nonsensical to us so that we wouldn't spend all of our time gazing into it but instead staying with the people but also it seems like things that went further from the metaphor it went further away from the you know the desktop like you were talking about maybe for some people things will iterate to that place you know we've done a lot of research here that showed that applications in China look completely different than applications here that people wanted more density more things whereas us having to do with um you know Latin and romantic languages need air around our letters and space in order for us to consume things correctly so we have that you know Italian influenced minimalist design in a lot of Western UI that then doesn't speak to the rest of the world if we kind of gave these experiments and let the computers do things we might end up with new paradigms new components new sorts of things that just haven't been explored yet and then we could end up with that Star Trek design because it organically happened and worked for somebody which I think is really cool yeah and I think what's interesting to me about that about seeing an interface that's so abstract that like someone is using it perfectly successfully and I have no idea what's going on like it just looks like shapes on a screen to me I'm for some reason I'm picturing like a pink screen with like an orange star in a green circle or something it's because you're looking at me right now I think that's kind of that's what I kind of look like um but I think what's interesting there is that there must be a recognition not only of what we're responding and adapting to but the ways that those responsive patterns ALS Al affect the environment and the context in which they appear that there's a subjective impact on the person using it as well that I think is going to be really crucial as we carry out these experiments and see what direction we want to go I miss putting in detail Easter egg love and attention into all UI the way that we did when iOS first came out and that was kind of the standard that happened um as applications were becoming a thing and people found that the way to get noticed was by doing that sort of thing and before like the markets just decided oh it's these five apps that you use on a daily basis and when things were skew morphic there was so much opportunity for that it was like oh I could make something that when the billiard ball goes across the table you can almost see the hair of the felt change and we all loved that sort of thing or it scrubbed or a pull down remember the pull to refreshes movement that had wacky sorts of things it's a pizza app so then it's a pizza being built coming together and then being eaten while we're refreshing your UI sort of thing I miss being able to put that sort of level of love into end applications I don't work on end applications anyway but I feel like there's still great opportunity for us to bring that sort of detail and love to users and that they appreciate it yes you can tell when someone was happy making the thing that you're seeing that's why you don't cry while you're cooking because then people will get sad when they eat it true um I have to say like going back to my point about you know my exuberant optimism about material and like where we're positioned there was a part of me that kind of couldn't believe that we shipped the wavy progress indicator for like playing music on Android that became like a system component like I think we are getting to a place where the joy of these components is allowed to be expressed and to be able to do that at a place like Google with all the complexity that you talked about is pretty impressive I think you know I'm going to give some props to um my friends on the Android team Lucas dupin uh and his team worked on that slider because um Android definitely has a culture of wanting to go that extra sometimes um Dan Sandler one of the um

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directors of engineering over there yeah he's responsible for the Easter egg that gets put into every single Android release um which is so cool and so Lucas was showing me the slider as he was working on it um to put it in there and I don't believe anybody asked him to do that but he saw it and loved it and the creative Direction was so strong that he said this feels incomplete until I have it and that's the sort of great partner that we love to work with over here is when that sort of thing matters to them that we're not like trust us this is great but instead they're like oh I see that it's great and I can't wait to give this to people um and there's also a tradition in material from several material releases of us showing people example applications of the creative direction that usually involve the music gap and then we have been called out on Twitter before for never building the music app people not understanding that not our department so I'm really glad that this was one of those times that could come full circle I have been among those calling us out before I was a Google where's my music app where's my material to mus we saw the animations but they're not on the phone where are they um I mean people don't even really know all the things that actually don't even make it to ever being shown to the public they're sometimes incredible but just get cut for time like in the movie or anything I think I mentioned this to you in something I wrote to you recently material 2 was so revolutionarily gorgeous and they spent so much time coming up with you know hundred ideas for it I used to just sit inside the deck as a low little engineer enjoying myself letting my eyes have a feast and there was this one thing um on uh image treatments we called it which was applying filters and how would you describe an image treatment yeah I guess my understanding is that some of them were kind of like shaders you're like transforming the image visually in a way that could be like a duone treatment or like a half tone where it's composed of dots and the dots are changing size dynamically mostly like loading States or like ways yeah the dot loaded State one is the one we all remember because it was this idea of showing like a like I'm uploading it in like a chat app because Google has a few of those I'm uploading this image it's going to take two seconds so I have this treatment of the image turned into you know lonstein dots that are changing size to make a wave to show that something is happening before it turns back to full color again to show me that's it's finished and it was pure inspiration I'm going to ask the audience to begin a campaign saying bring the image treatments Google release the image treatments the director's cut of material 2 deserves to be seen it does it absolutely does I will join that campaign I will sign the petition that's really where you could see the joy of the system coming out absolutely made me feel better by whatever was going on will thank you for joining me on design notes finally this has been a fun conversation and I'm glad that we could finally have it on mik it's been my pleasure Liam you know that you are absolutely one of my favorite people on the planet so to get to Basin your glory for a moment is really quite an honor Earth so thank you you can subscribe to design notes on Spotify Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening right now if you like this episode leave us five stars and stay tuned for more interviews with the founders and stewards of design at Google as we uncover new histories perspectives and futures for the interface as always thanks for listening and sharing