Google’s Material Design lead is moving to Dropbox

Developers and users who love Google’s Material Design language have Nicholas Jitkoff to thank for the inventive, yet simple visual philosophy that’s been adopted to build the interfaces of the company’s own products and thousands of Android apps.

Now, after more than a decade at Google, Jitkoff is heading to Dropbox as the company as its VP of design.

That’s a big win for the cloud storage firm, which has previously had trouble capitalizing on consumer products, like its Mailbox email client and Carousel photo backup tool that were shut down early last year.

However, it has begun focusing more on forward-thinking design lately. Its new Paper app, which lets you create, collaborate and present multi-purpose documents, looks fresh and does away with a lot of the unnecessary baggage that rival products bring with them from previous generations of productivity software.

Prior to serving as Principal Designer for Material Design at Google, Jitkoff was part of the team behind the ambitious Project Kennedy, an initiative to unify the visual interfaces of Google products in 2011 shortly after Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011.

In a blog post, the company noted that in addition to working closely with Dropbox’s engineering and product teams, Jitkoff will be tasked with helping to grow its “diverse and talented teams across Design Research, Product Design, Brand Design, and UX Writing.”