How long is 8 years in Internet time?

Posted by Dennis Hwang, Webmaster

This week we celebrate Google's 8th birthday, and I hope you like the commemorative logo that appears on today's homepage:
Having worked at Google for 6 years, I've been lucky enough to design our birthday images (and a lot of other doodles). I hope you enjoy reading the candles. :)

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Day off for Dennis

Posted by Rupert van Millingen, Google UK

From time to time, we like to reflect the world we live in through the logo designs on our home page. These Google 'doodles' are designed exclusively by the original Doodler, Dennis Hwang. Here in the UK, we wanted to let Dennis have the day off and give someone local the chance to get their artwork in front of millions. After a successful pilot competition in 2005, we're pleased to tell you that our 2006 "Doodle 4 Google - My Britain" competition is now open and accepting doodles from pupils ages 4-18 in all schools across the UK.

A panel of experts will judge, narrowing the submissions down to a Top 30 and the public will vote for their favorites. The winning doodle will be hosted on the Google.co.uk home page for a day, and also bag the artist a trip for four to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. To get your (again, UK) school involved, please check out Doodle 4 Google - My Britain.

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Gamesmanship

Posted by Michael Krantz, Google Blog Team

There's nothing we love more at Google than a public event that gives us an excuse to trot out some celebratory bells and whistles. Case in point: the 2006 Winter Games, now playing in Torino, Italy and on a wide-screen TV and, yes, computer screen very near you. How can Google help enhance your enjoyment of the world's finest athletes competing in one of the world's most gloriously wintry natural settings without actually getting up out of your office chair? Let us count the ways...

To begin with, our man Dennis is publishing a series of Torino-themed doodles showcasing the different events; check back with our home page early and often over the next couple weeks to see how the series progresses -- and for the historically minded, take a look at earlier doodles for Sydney '00, Salt Lake '02 and Greece '04.

Our intrepid in-house satellite globetrotters, meanwhile, have updated Google Earth and Google Local with high resolution imagery of the Torino area; you can read more about what the Earth folks have in store for you just below.

Speaking of vicarious thrills: want to surf the same web pages the athletes themselves will be perusing? The Lenovo i.lounge Start Page is the official homepage at the Athlete Villages and various other Winter Games VIP locations. It features no less than 8 Google products and should prove useful to thousands of hungry, lost, homesick, bored, news-hungry or otherwise information-needing athletes. And you can noodle around on them, too.

Finally, if you're from Italy, France, Great Britian, Switzerland, Austria, Greece or Spain and are interested in employing your geek skills to win a Fiat Sedici, throw yourself headlong into the Fiat/Google Earth Contest, which involves using Google Earth to sniff out a Torino location big enough to hide a car but (presumably) small enough to not be totally obvious within a few minutes. Those who aren't fortunate enough to reside in one of those countries can still enter to win an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy for a Ferrari 360 Experience (I don't know exactly what that is, but it certainly sounds cool).

Good luck to fanatical Fiat finders and to all the athletes at the Winter Games.

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Thanks Victoria doodlers!

Posted by Dennis Hwang, Webmaster and Google Doodler.

Last week Google opened our new office in the Victoria area of London, and to mark the occasion we invited students from nearby schools to create their own Google Doodles from our logo. My fellow judges and I were basically considering three qualities: the originality of the doodle idea or topic; integration of the design with the Google logo; and sheer creativity. We received hundreds of entries with all sorts of themes, ranging from serious topics like the Asian tsunami and the Battle of Trafalgar to an entire logo transformed into a bunch of eyes staring at each other. In the end, we chose these five finalists. And our winner, which graced our U.K. home page for a full day, was this charming doodle from 11-year-old Lisa Waiwaina:









In the end, I was simply blown away by the amazing quality of the work, especially from younger artists up to around age 11 (the bunnies drawn by 5-year-olds were simply awesome). It was a good reminder that staying in touch with one’s inner child can be a key to creativity. Now, back to my secret agenda of searching for a young apprentice...

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Oodles of doodles

One of the things I like best about Google is that we're the kind of company that, when a user writes in to suggest that we honor the once-every-122-years Transit of Venus on our home page, we actually do it!



My name is Dennis, and I'm the guy who draws the Google doodles. But the doodle tradition started here before I did. The first doodle was produced by (who else?) Larry and Sergey, who, when they attended the Burning Man festival in summer 1998, put a little stick figure on the home page logo in case the site crashed and someone wanted to know why nobody was answering the phone. By the time I began an internship here in the summer of 2000, the company was producing doodles on a regular basis. At the time I was a Stanford undergrad majoring in art and computer science, and, although I hadn't been hired to do anything remotely related to logo design, I eventually stumbled into my first doodle gig (Bastille Day, July 2000, for which I did a fairly boring flag motif).

And I've done all the doodles ever since; I've produced almost 150 by now. The doodles are only a small part of my actual job (as Google's international webmaster, I'm responsible for managing all our international site content, which keeps me plenty busy), but it's definitely my favorite. Holding up my mockups and then holding my breath while Larry and Sergey do their "thumbs-up, thumbs-down" emperor thing is never boring, and I love the fact that my little niche within this company turned out to be something so cool and creative and, well, Google-y.

What doodles will I be doing next? Well, telling you in advance would spoil the fun of it, and I have no idea anyway. If you've got any ideas of your own, feel free post them in the Web Search Help Forum. Who knows; you may just make a little Google history yourself.

-- Dennis Hwang

Update August 2009: Contact information updated; date and link corrected for first doodle.

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