Everything You Need to Know About the Google Doodle

Discover who's behind those digital illustrations on your Google homepage, how they're made, and why they started

It’s easy to get sidetracked before you even begin your Google search. Grabbing our attention on the browser’s homepage is often a digital illustration or an interactive game. These Google Doodles mark a wide array of events, celebrations, or anniversaries, usually with the word “Google” creatively interwoven into the title.

But who are the people behind these Google Doodles? How did Google Doodles become a thing? Who decides which event gets celebrated? And does everyone see the same Google Doodle? No need to go down a Google rabbithole to find out because we’ve got all the answers right here.

Who creates the Google Doodles?

You probably saw - and maybe even played - the remarkable Google Doodle game celebrating the Tokyo Olympics. Just behind a fiery red Google search bar bordered with pixelated characters lay a Japanese-inspired universe.

Historical characters and creatures from Japanese folklore populated a landscape reminiscent of the 16-bit video games from the 90s. Comprising 7 minigames, the biggest ever Doodle game was the result of a collaboration between the Google Doodle team and the Tokyo-based animation studio, Studio 4°C.

Google Doodle occasionally commissions Doodles from outside artists. One such example is a Doodle celebrating the first woman to vote in the 1911 Portuguese elections. Carolina Beatriz Angelo was a Portuguese physician and suffragette who discovered a loophole in the law that enabled her to vote.

Fittingly, Google asked Portuguese illustrator and Domestika teacher Fatinha Ramos (@fatinha_ramos) - who is herself a campaigner for social rights and equality and teaches the course Illustration with a Social Purpose: Leave Your Artistic Mark - to create the Doodle for this historic moment.

Google Doodle also holds a competition called “Doodle for Google”, where the winner gets their Doodle featured on the Google homepage.

In general, though, Google Doodles are created by a team of talented and versatile in-house digital illustrators and engineers.

Which events will be celebrated?

Ideas for events that are worth celebrating with a Doodle are regularly brainstormed and pitched within the Google Doodle team. As it says on their web page, the team chooses “interesting events and anniversaries that reflect Google’s personality and love for innovation.”

The public can also email Google with their suggestions: perhaps it’s the birthday of a famous Thai astronomer, or maybe Senegal’s Independence Day merits an honorary doodle.

Some famous Doodles that had a wide reach include Claude Debussy’s 151st birthday in 2019, celebrated with an animation of a 19th century Parisian backdrop lighting up to the music of Debussy’s classic “Clair de Lune”.

And in 2020, Google highlighted the incredible bravery of Sir Nicholas Winton with a heartwarming black and white digital illustration.

In the months preceding the Second World War, the banker Sir Winton raised money, bribed officials, and forged documents in order to enable the escape of over 600 primarily Jewish children from the German-occupied Czechoslovakia.

He never breathed a word of his humanitarian efforts, and it wasn’t until 1988 when his wife discovered all the documents in the attic that his bravery could be recognized.

How are they made?

There are no end of ways a Google Doodle can be made. In general they are digital illustrations, and many require a combination of illustration skills and complex software engineering. But sometimes, the Google Doodle goes analogue.

For Julius Richard Petri’s 161st birthday - the inventor of the petri dish - the team built a makeshift lab and wrote the Google letters into six petri dishes with a dirty swab. They photographed the bacteria’s growth every twenty minutes for two weeks, and used the timelapse to reveal the word “Google'' on the homepage.

And to mark Lotte Reiniger’s 117th birthday, a pre-Disney filmmaker who made animations by taking thousands of photos of paper-cut silhouettes, the Doodle team painstakingly created their own papercut animation.

How did they start?

It all started with the most basic of doodles: a stickman. In 1998, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were setting off for the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. As a quirky take on the “out of office” message, they decided to place the Burning Man logo - a kind of stick figure - behind one of the o’s on the Google homepage.

Two years later they asked one of their interns, Dennis Hwang, to create a doodle for Bastille Day. Although just a simple doodle with some lines around the Google logo indicating fireworks, a french flag, and the words “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” underneath, it was so popular that Dennis Hwang was appointed Google’s chief doodler.

A couple of decades on, and the Google Doodle is now its own institution full of artists and engineers whose sole purpose is to make the search engine a more colorful and informative place.

Does everyone see the same doodle?

The simple answer is: No. On the Google Doodle web page you can check the “reach” of each Doodle.

The Champion Island Games doodle celebrating the Olympics almost reached the whole world except for a small handful of countries. But the majority of Doodles are created to celebrate events or people that are culturally relevant in specific countries.

Let's look at some examples:

- 130th Anniversary of France delivering the Statue of Liberty to the United States Doodle: reached the US and France.

- Maria Izquierdo's 112th Birthday Doodle, celebrating the first Mexican woman to have her artwork exhibited in the United States: reached Mexico.

- Maria Firmina dos Reis’ 194th Birthday Doodle - created by guest artist Nik Neves - in honor of the pioneering Brazilian teacher, thinker, and activist: reached Brazil.

If you want to discover all past and present Google Doodles, just head to the Doodles Archive page and enjoy! And if you want to improve your illustration skills, check out all Domestika courses and unleash your creativity.

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