How the Google Doodles Are Made

You have seen some fantastic Google Doodles on the Google.com homepage. We all love them and expect that Google will come up with a very creative doodle on holidays, world events and birthdays of famous people.

But what you might not know is how these doodles are made, how much time it takes to create a doodle and most importantly – who designs them?

One of the interesting things about Google Doodles is that there is no announcement regarding the release of a doodle. Google surprises everyone by changing the logo of their homepage all of a sudden. A recent example is the Pacman doodle by Google.

How the Google Doodles are made?

There is a team of designers who are behind the doodles you see on Google.com. The main lead being Denis Hwang who is supported by Micheal Lopez, Ryan Germick, Susie Sahim and Jennifer Hom.

How the Idea of a Google Doodle Originated?

The doodle team has created over 300 doodles for Google.com in the United States and over 700 have been designed internationally. Way back in 1999, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were looking for a doodle to display in the Google.com homepage. The first Google Doodle was a stick figure drawing, the idea was to let people know that Larry and Sergey would attend the Burning man festival at Nevada for a few days.

Larry and Sergey hired a freelancer but were unhappy with the quality of the doodle made. Then they turned to Denis, who was an intern at Google at that time. Denis created a Doodle for the Bastille Day. Pleased with the result, Denis was appointe as the Chief Doodler at Google and from that time, Doodles took a permanent place on the Google.com homepage.

Here is a very nice interview of Denis hwang where he shares various aspects about Google Doodles, how to choose a doodle topic and ways to improvise and innovate.

You can read the entire history of Google Doodles at the official doodles page.

Creating a Google Doodle – Time Lapse Video

Here is a time lapse video which describes how the Google Doodle are actually made on computer.

Google also organizes interesting competitions to encourage kids and students for creating Google Doodles. On the Indian picture, 9 year old Puru Pratap Singh won the Doodle for Google 2009 contest and his doodle portrait was shown on the Google.com homepage.

10 years of Googling and Doodling – All the Google Doodles from 1999

View the complete archive of Google holiday logos and official logos. Also read this trick which will let you replace the Google Logo with your favorite Google Doodle.