Interview with Google logo designer

Doodling with the face of an Internet giant

It may be Christmas, Valentine’s Day or Vincent van Gogh’s birthday when Internet users notice that the logo on the global search engine Google has changed. The designer behind the changes is Dennis Hwang, a Korean American who, as Google’s international webmaster, is in charge of all the content that appears on Google Web sites globally.
The JoongAng Daily caught up with the busy Hwang last Wednesday while he was on a brief visit to Seoul to give a lecture at a technology expo.

Q. How did you become a logo designer?
A. Ever since I was little, I loved doodling and was scolded in elementary school for doing so. Later I majored in art with a minor in computer science so when I was an intern at Google, the founders were like, “Hey, you’re an art major, right? Why don’t you try designing the logo?” My first one was on July 14, 2000, and it was very exciting.

Are there any fun anecdotes related to some of the logos you’ve designed?
On Aug. 15, 2001, I designed a logo for the liberation day of Korea, but received a lot of e-mail from Indian users because the day also was the founding day of India. There were also complaints from Japanese users, many of whom told us that the Google site was hacked because they didn’t think that Google would put up a logo for the Korean holiday on the international Google site.
Once, when I drew autumn leaves in a logo for Thanksgiving, there were protests from Australian users. It was quite a shocking experience for me and from then on, I’ve learned to be more careful when it comes to seasons or culture.
One positive thing I remember is on Louis Braille’s birthday, I made the Google logo in Braille [Louis Braille was the inventor of Braille, a worldwide system used by blind and visually impaired people for reading and writing].
I heard that on that day the traffic at Web sites for organizations for the visually impaired increased 10 times.

How many logos do you design a year?
I think I design more than 50 a year, but you won’t find them all on Google Korea’s site because some of them are specifically for regional sites.

Do you paint or draw at home?
I have a lot of work, and it’s difficult to find time even to make the logos. By the time I’m home, I don’t feel like drawing any more. Making the logos fulfills all of my artistic desires.

From a designer’s perspective, what do you think of the layout or design of Korean portals such as Daum and Naver?
Those portals have different goals. They have integrated search functions and are convenient because you can find all that you want on the first page.
The latest, newest technology is available in Korea, and the Internet speed in Korean households is more or less homogenous, so Internet portals don’t have to worry about people’s Internet environments.
However, on a global basis, there are still people who use text browsers, or vision-impaired people can’t run script that involves Active X, so I think we’re aiming for different things.
Also, unlike other portals, Google doesn’t consider itself as a portal. Our goal is to have people come, find their information and leave as soon as possible. We don’t want people to come and spend a lot of time on our site, so we eliminate unnecessary images and design factors.

You have to oversee all the webmasters. What is your management style?
I’m strict about mistakes to make sure it doesn’t happen again because if one person makes a mistake, the experience of hundreds or thousands of people can change. I’m not the kind of person that yells or turns over chairs, though. I think it’s inefficient. You have to make people voluntarily want to work because they love it, not out of fear.

What do you see yourself doing in 10 years? Will you still be “doodling” Google logos?
I’m the kind of person that likes to hide in the corner and work quietly in front of the computer. My job now requires a lot of human interaction, because I have to recruit and make sure everyone is happy and so forth.
In a sense, it’s a job that’s not really me. I still have dreams as a developer, which I believe is every engineer’s dream.

By Wohn Dong-hee

FTA effect on media small: experts

The free trade agreement with the United States will have little effect on both traditional and new media markets, U.S. specialists said yesterday.

In a special seminar to kick off the three-day Seoul Digital Forum held at the Sheraton Walkerhill in eastern Seoul, Columbia University economics professor Eli Noam and Boston Consulting Group senior vice president Philip Evans spoke on the U.S. FTA and its impact on media.

“FTAs have less effect on media than the imagination of critics. Media have different economics than industrial or agricultural products and are not much governed by FTA-style agreements,” Noam said.

He divided the media into three categories ― content, distribution, and devices ― and said that the FTA would not largely affect any of those sectors. “Hardware is already highly open and market access to Korea for content, such as falling quotas, has been happening anyway,” Noam said. “Broadband and other distribution makes quota reductions obsolete anyway. Intellectual property rights protection is happening anyway, and [such rights] are unenforceable anyway,” he added.

Both specialists mentioned that the FTA would have an impact on content with low domestic effects but potential global impact, such as interactive games that can be played around the world. Evans said that businesses that are significantly locally based, including traditional media such as newspapers, will not be affected by the FTA.

He also emphasized that new media businesses, such as television, music and most notably, video games, are emerging forms of media that are not controlled by a specific company or country. The impact of removing trade barriers, he said, usually depends on the tension between local and global bases of competitive advantage, but that user-created content throws doubt on that point of view.

Giving the example of the virtual world Second Life, Evans pointed out that although it was established by a U.S. firm, the value of the content, which is created by global users including Koreans, is 10 times more than the initial investment. “New media are thus accommodating global and local advantages independently of international legal and tariff arrangements,” he said.

by Wohn Dong-hee for JoongAng Daily

Analyst: China will pass Korea in chipmaking

Korean memory chipmakers will likely lose ground in global markets to Taiwanese rivals as memory prices continue to fall, a leading market analyst said yesterday.

At the Seoul Digital Forum, iSuppli CEO Derek Lidow said Korean firms’ hold on the dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chip market will falter. Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. and Hynix Semiconductor are the top two memory chipmakers in the world, holding about 45 percent of the market last year by revenue. iSuppli is one of the world’s largest IT market research firms.

Lidow said that the situation for DRAM is severe because price levels today are below production costs for almost all suppliers. “The market will bottom out within the next seven weeks. The overall industry will see double digit profit losses when they report [performance] in July,” he said.

In particular, Lidow said that China and Taiwan will pass Korea as the region with the largest share of DRAM production by 2010.

“There is a high concentration of production in Korea and a few key suppliers, while the Taiwan/China region has many suppliers of DRAM and is able to spread the risk of investment over many more players,” he pointed out. “This makes it hard for Korean suppliers to fight off so many competitors at once.”

He said that the situation is similar to that of liquid crystal displays, where Korea lost dominance to Taiwan and China three years ago.

“Creation of more investment capital through market liberalization or through tax incentives will help Korean industry diversify and make use of immense talents in population,” Lidow suggested. “With such a narrow base in the IT industry here, I believe that innovations will always be at risk of being taken over and copied by other regions who have the ability to attract that risk [venture] capital.”

By Wohn Dong-hee for JoongAng Daily

Expo showcases latest gadgets, minus cameras

	Prime Minister Han Duck-soo talks live with baseball star Lee Seung-yeop yesterday using KTF39s video phone service at the Korea IT Show 2007, taking place at COEX in southern Seoul. [YONHAP]

Cutting-edge technology is going beyond generating user-made content to broadcasting that content live using tiny devices that can be linked to just about every electronic product in your home.

Exhibiting the latest trends, the four-day Korea IT Show 2007 began yesterday, with an IT ministerial conference and various industry forums taking place on the sidelines. The show is a combination of five exhibitions that used to be separate events. They were lumped together because some technologies and products overlapped, and it was difficult for companies to finance multiple expos.

Hosted jointly by the Information Ministry and the Commerce Industry, the exhibition features about 300 companies including domestic biggies Samsung Electronics Co., LG Electronics Inc., SK Telecom Co. and KTF, as well as a few foreign firms such as Qualcomm, Canon, Sharp, ARM and Agilent Technologies.

Companies are taking advantage of the show to announce new product releases. Samsung Electronics unveiled an upgraded version of its ultra mobile mini PC, Q1 Ultra. LG Electronics revealed for the first time in Korea its next-generation dual-format “Super Blu” player that plays both DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.

Aside from all the latest gadgets, gizmos, huge TVs and ear-pounding sound systems, the main new trend this year was live broadcasting. This was a new thing because 3G phone services weren’t commercially available last year.

KTF had a booth featuring its new third-generation mobile, Play. Video phone calls, one of the main functions of the new service, were used in a variety of scenarios, such as live broadcasting and live home monitoring.

Satellite broadcaster TU Media had a live interactive radio program, TU Request, going on at its open studio at the show, receiving listener requests live.

SK Telecom also had a lot of live self-generated content. While watching television, a person could pop up his or her phone on the side of the screen and send what’s being seen on TV to the person at the other end of the line, while talking or text-messaging at the same time. The key point to this mobile technology was that it could be linked to other electronic products in your home. “It’s so convenient that I can manage my washing machine with my cell phone from outside the house,” said Kim Yeon-mi, a housewife in Seoul.

Not all of the show was about consumer technology. Although invisible to regular attendees, scores of meetings between foreign buyers and domestic firms took place in private rooms, many prearranged by the Korea International Trade Association. Vietnamese firm VTC Intecom and China’s Kongzhong sought mobile game companies while Italy’s Italia Commerce looked for PC monitor and hard disk drive firms.
Surprisingly, the IT show did not include digital cameras. Although Canon had a booth (printers and solutions were on display), there were no digital SLRs or IXUSs. Nikon, which also has a local office, was nowhere in sight, despite the huge community of Koreans who own digital Nikon cameras.

Perhaps taking a lesson from the recent Seoul Motor Show, which was slammed for having too many sexy female models, the IT Show had a surprisingly high number of male informants for a Korean exhibition. Although both female and male guides were still visually attractive, they were trained to talk glibly about ubiquitous technology and demonstrate mobile broadcasting or the functions of home networking systems.

The show also proved that as technologies merge and consumers are left with overwhelming options, that technology can be about more fundamental things, like finding a way to make shoulder straps more comfortable. L.C. Corp. displayed a whole assortment of shock-absorbent laptop bags and shoulder straps under its AirCell brand, which is not available in Korea.

By Wohn Dong-hee for JoongAng Daily