Google announced its 25th “birthday” the other day with a few customized searches, some “how far we’ve come” blog posts, and its usual logo shenanigans. The animation below shows off how its standard logo has evolved over the years before adjusting to “G25gle” at its climax.
The next day, the logo was back to normal, but that’s just how Google rolls—every Doodle has its day.
The Google Doodle is a graphic design tradition with a curious history. It’s even older than Google itself—at least officially. The first Doodle appeared after the website had stopped calling itself “Backrub,” but a week before its incorporation as a company. Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were off to Burning Man, and they posted the Burning Man symbol—a Page sketch—signaling that they’d be out of office.
The company likes to present the Google Doodles as an inevitable outgrowth of Brin and Page’s playful intelligence, but they took their time emerging. A few months later, the company put out a Thanksgiving doodle. Unlike the Burning Man image, this one was set up so that only American users would see it.
And after that, for eleven months…that was it. Halloween was the next occasion to be marked…
And after a near-repeat of the Thanksgiving logo, other holidays followed: Christmas, New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day. Over the first five days of May 2000, an “alien invasion” resulted in the logo being “stolen” to some faraway planet…
Not much information exists about who drew these early doodles. Brin and Page’s first official “Doodle hire” was Dennis Hwang, who auditioned while an intern with a new logo for Bastille Day.
All these logos, though, didn’t change the design that much. They mostly added a few visual bells and whistles, and occasionally swapped out a letter or two. With the doodle celebrating Claude Monet’s birthday, this approach began to change.
Today’s doodles are more likely to commemorate holidays or people you might not already know, and they tend to be far more visually inventive…
Conventional wisdom is that branding should be consistent. Google has bucked that by being “consistently inconsistent,” by turning its logo around for any reason it can find. By spotlighting women, minorities. and international evevents, the logos act as a statement of company values.
Is that statement still a reflection of what the company is, or a pretty distraction from all the ways it’s changed?
I suppose that, too, is in the eye of the beholder.