When Google met Doodle !!

“Doodle” -The term itself is a squiggle, isn’t it? Hmmm so what does this cute little word weave in your mind? ; D Some kid stuff right. Or is it you are daydreaming and suddenly an unobstructed view of your subconscious mind has just slipped out into your paper or maybe anywhere…Hahhaa :)

Let’s dig deep into the meaning of doodles.

In simple terms, a doodle is a pattern that you draw absent-mindedly or when you are bored. Doodling keeps you focused and also gives your brain some space to relax. It calms us when we are frustrated or depressed. It also enhances our creativity. Anything in the back of your mind can come to fruition naturally in the process of relaxation. So that’s a double gift to yourself, isn’t it? :)

So, all of us have doodled at least once in our lives. Do you know that the most important people in our history were also great doodlers? And such quirky figures were also present in the margins of famous historical manuscripts. These cute little figures amaze everyone, and this is why Google Doodle came into existence. 

What is a Google Doodle?

The leader of the doodle team at Google, Jessica Yu, says, “It was a little bit of a joke”. Yes, Google doodles began just as a piece of a joke and are now celebrated over the world regularly as a tech giant. 
You have seen little pictures and animations that are sometimes visible on the Google homepage. Yeah, those are called google doodles. On clicking those animations, you might see some games linked to them as well.

These temporary alterations to Google’s logo range from various small to traditional artistic modifications. They accentuate ancient events, world issues, holidays, birthdays, celebrations, and anniversaries of famous personalities. They also include animations which on being clicked give us information regarding any specific topic related to that animation.  

All of us have been through these cute animations but most of us (including me) haven’t put attention to what they are, how are they created, or why. Suddenly, I came across one beautiful animation and had the curiosity to know what’s behind the creation of such cute patterns. On doing some research (obviously via Google ;), I found that there’s an entire big team behind creating doodles.

How did it start?

Google designed its first doodle in 1998, and its idea came when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin attended a Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert in the United States. They placed a cross-like stick resembling a man behind the second ‘O’ of Google’s main logo to let their users know that they were ‘out of office’ in a fun way. 

And thus, the idea of decorating the company logo with such notable events came to their mind. Google was a very young company at that time. It was not even corporated completely. 
After two years, in 2000, Larry Page and Sergey Brin asked Dennis Hwang, who was an intern at that time and is a webmaster currently at Google, to design a logo for Bastille Day. 

This logo was very well received by the users at that time.  Thus, Dennis Hwang got appointed as the chief doodler of Google. From then onwards, they started doodling very frequently, and they gained popularity. Over time, users liked it a lot and, the demand for google doodles increased rapidly. And a team of doodlers who were also great engineers was appointed to create doodles and bring life to Google’s homepage, thus bringing a smile to people’s faces worldwide. Today the team intends to produce around 400 doodles per year, including various animations and interactive games.

Varieties among Google Doodles:

In the early years, the Google doodles were very simple. It just highlighted some text when you levitate over it. But nowadays, we have cute animations over Google’s logo signifying certain special events worldwide. 

The first animated doodle:

The first doodle with animation was designed in 2000 for Halloween’s day. It consisted of two jack-o-lanterns in place of the two O’s of Google, and a spider was hanging from the letter ‘L’.

A very cute animation that I would like to mention was designed recently on June 22, 2021, for people to remain vaccinated. It asked people to get vaccinated. Wear Mask. And Save lives. 

The first Google doodle game:

Gradually, the team’s abilities kept on improving, and in 2010, the first Google doodle interactive game was created. It was the Pac-Man doodle game that celebrated the 30th anniversary of the classic arcade game released by Namco in 1980.

It was a grand development for Google, and the doodle soon became a very addictive pastime for billions of people. The doodle game used the same graphics, the same colors, and the same characters. Hence, it brought back nostalgic memories for us. There is an option called ‘Insert coin’ and you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to play the game. 

The first Crossword puzzle doodle:

Google created a crossword puzzle to give tribute and preserve the 100 years of crossword puzzles on the 21st of December, 2013. With the help of the best well-known instructors of crosswords, Google built its version of crosswords. 

The first doodle coding game:

A coding game was built for children on the 4th of  December, 2017 to introduce the world of programming. The game was about connecting blocks that represented coding concepts. It had a rabbit that had to cross levels to get its food. The game was made in collaboration with MIT during Computer Science Education week to celebrate 50 years of Kids coding.

From then, various doodle games were created even for sports fans, including cricket games, baseball, basketball, card games. There were also games for music lovers. One was Fischinger, which was an interactive designing and music composition tool for users. Another one was for celebrating Hip-hop, celebrating Halloween. Google also created games for science-fiction enthusiasts. There are also games for food lovers and whatnot!! Hahaa…I love you Google. 

One game that I would like to specifically mention is the Doodle Champion Island Games, which was built in honor of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games. It is the most elaborate, complex, and engaging game built up to date made in partnership with Tokyo-based animation studio, Studio 4°C. It has seven mini-Olympic game sporting events like table tennis, archery, skateboarding, rugby, swimming, marathon, and climbing. It has four teams, namely, Blue, Red, Green, Yellow. 

You can try the game for yourself from Doodle Champion Island Games Begin! (google.com).

Creating all these regularly takes a lot of effort which, arises a question in our mind as – Why? And does this do any benefit to the company?

So…Why?

Making Doodles takes a huge cost of time and money and might even result in potential embarrassment to the company at times. Further, it doesn’t even make direct benefits to the company. People might think doodles improve traffic to the browser but, it's nothing like that. They do not even benefit the company's revenue because Google’s revenue comes from ad clicks and doodles appear on Google's ad-free homepage. Then why do such a big company would prefer to waste its time?

But the one reason that is worth investing all the time and money after these doodles are the content. Doodles change our viewpoint towards Google. Googles show care and respect towards humans via doodles. They express to the world that they care about our existence which depicts the soft nature of the company. And perhaps this factor is the most important for the company. 

As one of their doodle designers says, “it shows the human behind the machine”. It helps the users with pieces of information that they may not know. The doodles started as fun but have now grown as an essential part of our thinking towards Google. We think of Google as an intelligent, creative company having super-creative employees making great things for us. And this is what matters even more than money. We trust them, their content. Google is very skilled at answering us. Ask anything in this universe to Google, it even has the ultimate questions of life, and that’s fun.

The doodle team also accepts doodle ideas from its users. The users can email their designs to doodleproposals@google.com. 

So basically, it’s a way of bringing a smile to million faces every day. And that’s so sweet of them. :)