• BusinessWeek, Tuesday, March 31, 2009 1:30 PM

Twitter has hired ex-Google Visual Design lead Douglas Bowman as its new creative director. Bowman replaces co-founder Biz Stone. "The Twitter Web page looks pretty simple," Stone told BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante. "But from our perspective the design needs a lot of work."

Bowman is a talented designer who used to work at Wired News before moving to Google. "This is a great hire for Twitter, and more proof that Twitter has replaced Facebook as the tech industry's hottest startup," says Ante, adding that Bowman "clearly sees a bigger opportunity at Twitter, not only from a design perspective but perhaps from a monetary one as well." Ante also points out that Bowman will become increasingly important as Twitter expands. It's an enormous design challenge to help users manage a site with an increasingly large amount of information flowing through it.

Bowman left Google in a candid blog post earlier this month. In it, he complained about having a debate over whether a border should be three, four, or five pixels wide. "I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions," he said. "There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

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