Google loses Material Design’s principal lead to Dropbox

Nicholas Jitkoff, a principal designer at Google since 2006 is leaving the company to be Dropbox’s vice president of Design (via TechCrunch). Responsible for helping create and lead Material Design, Jitkoff worked with product teams around the company to consistently deploy the design language.

Before his broader role as Material Design’s principal designer, Jitkoff was a user experience lead for Chrome. He was involved in Project Kennedy, Google’s first big push to unify the design of the company’s products after Larry Page became CEO in 2011.

The designer was also instrumental in helping create Material Design, launched in 2014. Most recently, his role involved working with marketing and search teams to insure that Google’s new design language was being enforced throughout the company.

Dropbox hints that working on productivity was one of the reasons that the Googler jumped over. As vice president of Design, Jitkoff will work closely with Engineering and Product teams, as well as have oversight of Design Research, Product Design, Brand Design, and UX Writing.

With Google’s recent aggressive expansion into the cloud and enterprise, Dropbox is a direct competitor more than ever. Just last week, the company launched its Google Docs competitor and announced a redesign of its web interface.

To the talented folks at @googledesign and Material: thank you so much for a wonderful ten years. It has been an honor to work with you! 👋❤️

— Nicholas Jitkoff (@alcor) February 7, 2017