Google Doodlers

Growing up in Uniondale, N.Y., Jennifer Hom loved to draw, especially doodles of flowers, unicorns and fairies. Today, the artist still doodles--but for an audience of millions of computer users who visit google.com, the popular Internet search site.

Working at the offices of Google Inc. in Mountain View, Calif. (pop. 74,066), Hom is a member of the creative team that produces amusing, informative and whimsical doodles that decorate Google's corporate logo on its home page for national holidays and special events--or sometimes just for fun.

"Don't listen to anyone who says you can't do anything with art, because it's not true," says Hom, 24, who graduated in 2009 from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Celebrating everything from the Fourth of July to Albert Einstein's birthday to the anniversary of the Pac-Man arcade game, Google doodlers humanize the company's worldwide search network, used more than 1 billion times daily. Their creations have become an important part of the Google brand and generate waves of chatter and goodwill on the Internet.
The Art of Google Google celebrates special events and national holidays through creative doodles fashined from its corporate logo. Play Video
"Google doodles allow us to have fun with our company logo and express our love of art and technology," says Ying Wang, Google's director of product management. "We want to share this fun with our users and hope our doodles put a smile on their faces before they go on to their daily activities."

Doodling around
The first doodle was introduced in 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of what then was a startup company, were leaving town to attend the Burning Man Festival, a weeklong music and arts event in the northern Nevada desert. To signal to Google users that they were away from their desks, they inserted a primitive line drawing of the Burning Man logo behind the second "O" in the Google name.

Periodically, other doodles followed featuring simple clip art to enhance the company's logo for New Year's Day, Valentine's Day and other prominent holidays, as well as the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia.

Dennis Hwang was 22 and a computer-programming intern from Stanford University when he became the company's first chief doodler. Hwang, who enjoyed drawing cartoons for his own amusement, made his Google debut on July 14, 2000, with a doodle celebrating France's Bastille Day.

Users responded enthusiastically to the artwork, and doodles have been a regular feature of Google's home page ever since. Over the years, the team has created more than 300 doodles for the U.S. site and more than 700 for Google home pages in 45 other nations in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South America.

"We create images to astound, amuse and educate our users," says Ryan Germick, 31, who joined Google in 2006 as the team's first full-time doodler. "We're always trying to one-up ourselves and do something that hasn't been done before, but we also want it to remain fun for the users."