Google's Material Design team leader departs to join Dropbox

Nicholas Jitkoff, the leader of Google’s Material Design team, is departing the company for another gig. The cloud file storage company Dropbox has announced it has hired Jitkoff to be its new Vice President of Design.

Jitkoff has been a designer at Google since 2006, and lead the team that brought us the company’s Material Design language for Android apps. The language and style has since been adopted by most of Google’s first-party Android apps, along with some of its web-based products. It’s also been adopted by a number of third-party Android apps, including Dropbox.

In its blog post announcing its hiring of Jitkoff, the company said he has been “an active Dropbox user since our inception”. It added that in his new position, Jitkoff will work close with Dropbox’s Engineering and Product teams, and will also help to grow its various design-oriented teams, which include its Product and Brand groups, along with UX Writing and Design Research.

Jitkoff also noted his departure from Google in a message on his Twitter account today, thanking his now former co-workers “for a wonderful ten years”:

It will be interesting to see how Jitkoff will use all that design experience at Google at the much smaller Dropbox . We suspect he will take all of that knowledge and have a major influence in future versions of the company’s cloud storage and collaboration apps. Indeed, he’s set to compete with Google’s own products in that area, including Google Docs and Google Drive.