Google hired Douglas Bowman, the man that designed Blogger homepage, many Blogger templates and Google Calendar. He will be Google's Visual Design Lead, a new position created for him. Douglas says he will try to redesign products like Gmail, Writely, Page Creator in order to "establish a common visual language" between Google products.
Douglas Bowman is the founder of Stopdesign, a company that "specializes in a simple, beautiful aesthetic, balance of form and function, and highly flexible design". That seems the right match for Google, that didn't care too much about design until recently.