AIGA has recognized Google with the 2018 Corporate Leadership Award as an exemplary company modeling design's potential to delight users, inspire visionary products and services, fuel innovation, and improve our world. The Award honors perceptive and forward-thinking organizations instrumental in the advancement of design.
"Google's legacy is evident, from smaller moments to the creation of their Material Design language," commented Julie Anixter, executive director of AIGA. "They've even tapped into design's potential to give back and advance education, job opportunities, nonprofits, and our communities. By sharing these accomplishments, we are highlighting what a deep and diverse organization-wide commitment to design can look like."
"We believe Google is a company that's supporting the future of design and technology through its people, its work, and its commitments," AIGA stated. "Google models design that delights and scales across the enterprise, and exemplifies the value of design through diverse and personal user experiences, products, services, and programs that create opportunity for everyone.
"Google's particular passion and commitment to design is evident in: their history of design innovation, which began with the design of the original Google site and continues through their deeply varied expressions of design in products, services, and resources; their daily Google Doodles, sprint methodologies, and the Material design system; participation and sponsorship of numerous conferences, including their own conference about design and technology, the genesis of SPAN, now in its fifth year. AIGA also worked with Google to conceive and produce an expansive Design Census that touches on diversity, ethnicity, education level, geographic location, and sources of satisfaction among designers to map an accurate landscape of the design profession as it exists today."