WHAT’S THE DAY’S DOODLE?
Be it Christmas, MF Husain’s 100th birth anniversary or actress Nutan turning 81, Google ensures you don’t forget. Quirky stick figures, interactive multimedia games and open contests for sketches, billions of people logging into the Google search engine every morning also look forward to the day’s doodle.
These fun changes to the logo have a history as old as the company itself, “In 1998, before the company was incorporated... founders Larry and Sergey played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert,” says the company blog. They placed a stick figure drawing behind the second ‘o’ in Google, implying they were out of office. In 2000, the current head of web, Den Hwang, an intern the time, was ask to produce a doo for Bastille Day. Denis’s doodle — featured firewor and the French fl — was so well received that he appointed Googl ‘chief doodler’. Initially, the doodle was the same across all countries and was restricted to well-recognised national holidays. Over the years it began to be used to celebrate events, people and objects that few had heard of to tournaments like the football World Cup. This demand led to a team of artists and engineers dedicated to creating doodles relevant to different countries. Music, videos and interactive games have made it to doodles over this decade. On October 8, 2010, Google ran its first video doodle, an animation short that celebrated the 70th birth anniversary of Beatles co-founder John Lennon. With ‘Imagine’ playing in the background, groovy sketches flowed into patterns that combined with his iconic spectacles to form the logo.