Ever Wonder How All Those Quirky Daily Google Doodles Get Made? We Spoke to the Head of the Project

In
1998, Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin,
were on their way to Burning Man and wanted to message their trip
to the world. So they took Google’s signature logo, which greets
visitors to the company’s homepage, and replaced the second “o”
with an image of the festival’s
icon. They considered
their “out-of-office” message a public inside joke.

This
is how Google Doodles began—and the company, only a few months old,
wasn’t even incorporated yet. 

Now,
21 years and several thousand Doodles later, the daily sketches are
the quirky face of one of the world’s most powerful companies.
They’re the subjects of Facebook posts and small talk with
colleagues. Your dad probably sends them to you in body-less
emails.

Most
artists dream of garnering an audience of thousands. Google’s
Doodlers, as they’re known—a shifting lineup of dozens of artists,
engineers, and product managers based in the company’s headquarters
in Mountain View, California—work on a platform that averages over
five billion searches per day. As a team, they publish several
hundred Doodles a year across the world. 

“It’s…
tricky,” Jessica Yu, the Doodle team lead, tells artnet News while
laughing. “It takes a lot of planning.”

The
majority of Google’s Doodles are born in a giant brainstorming
session held yearly by Yu and her staff.

“We go
through thousands and thousands of suggestions we get from
Googlers, outsiders, or people on our team,” she says. “We read
through all of those, and then we go country by country to figure
out what the calendar is going to be for the year. We try and make
sure we have a diverse calendar in many respects—culturally,
thematically, geographically, etc. You want funny moments, poignant
moments, educational or inspiration moments.”

They
finalize the calendar with a company representative from each
country in which they operate (Google’s Doodles differ depending on
where you are in the world), then go about “conceptualizing” each
artwork, determining whether an image will be static or animated,
interactive or automatic, video- or game-based. And then they plot
out who will design it. Illustrators get many of the
straightforward drawings; engineers are assigned the more elaborate
ones. In most cases, the two groups collaborate.

The
Doodles have been workshopped in just about every artistic medium:
pencil-on-paper drawings, graphic design, photography, and even
claymation. The team often seeks out local artists to realize
regionally specific artworks. 

Artists themselves have also been popular
honorees for the Doodlers. Ruth
Asawa, Lygia
Clark, Giorgio
Morandi, Juan
Gris, Käthe
Kollwitz, Wassily
Kandinsky,
Henri de Toulouse
Lautrec, Gustav
Klimt, and dozens more
have all had their day atop the search engine’s home
page.

Yu
estimates that 95 percent of her team’s Doodles are planned over a
year in advance, but the remaining five percent are created in
response to something newsworthy. “It gives us the ability to act on the fly on
particular occasions,” she says.

For
instance, earlier this year, when NASA released the first image of
a black hole, Google created an
animated, black hole-themed Doodle within an hour.

Of
course, given the shear amount of data available to the company,
it’s not a stretch to think that the Doodle team could anticipate
newsworthy moments and create responsive artworks. But that’s not
the goal, Yu says. Her team isn’t concerned with the performance of
a given Doodle—not in a traffic-based, ones and zeros sense, at
least.

“It’s
not necessarily about maximizing the number of clicks,” she
explains. “It’s a very heart-driven organization in a very
data-driven company, quite frankly. We know that not every Doodle
is going to be everyone’s favorite, so we aim to ensure that every
Doodle is going to be somebody’s favorite.”

The post Ever Wonder How All Those Quirky Daily Google
Doodles Get Made? We Spoke to the Head of the Project appeared
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