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Oodles of doodles
June 8, 2004
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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