Douglas Bowman, an established designer with widely acclaimed designs for sites like Blogger and Wired News, has hopped on the Google bandwagon as Visual Design Lead.

“After a bit of negotiation and a lot of internal debate, I recently accepted an offer to join Google as Visual Design Lead, a position that did not previously exist there.”

This is not Douglas’ first experience with Google. He has aided designers with Google projects like Blogger and Calendar in the past. In the new position he will be in charge of helping Google establish a common style across all of their products including Gmail, Writely, Page Creator, and more.

I look forward to seeing how he handles the task. His work is very specialized. The redesign he did for Blogger improved the user interface dramatically. He even manages to take the ugliest of web interfaces and make them beautiful.

Is Douglas the answer to Google’s lackluster pages? It’s possible. My biggest complaint about Google is that their services don’t complement one another, and they feel awkward as stand alones. So it’s good to hear that Google is looking to change this by creating common ground across all of their sites. Perhaps Douglas and his team will do something about this mess.