Now imagine more than a billion people looking at your doodles in a given day. Better yet, imagine getting paid for them.
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| Micheal Lopez, who heads the team of doodlers at Google, never takes credit for his doodles. It's a team effort, he says. |
During the Olympics, which end Sunday, that means a different home-page doodle -- depicting everything from curling to hockey -- for each of the 17 days of the games. There's no set number on how many doodles Google does in a year, although the creations are appearing on its site more often. (Click here for a Google doodle history.) However, there is one rule for how a doodle should look: It must incorporate some form of the word "Google."
"We have a lot of fun and we like to innovate," says Micheal Lopez, the Web designer who heads the small team of doodlers based at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Lopez says employees from all over Google contribute ideas for doodles. On a few occasions, guest artists such as Jim Lee of DC Comics or Eric Carle, author of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," also have contributed doodles.
CNN talked with Lopez about why Google, which is known for its clean Web design, changes its logo and what the company hopes to communicate to its users through the doodles.
Why change the Google logo?
Because it's fun. I think that was the idea early on way back when [Google co-founder] Sergey [Brin] did our first doodle [in 1998] for the Burning Man [an annual festival in the Nevada desert]. It was a fun way to tell our users where they were going for the day. That basically translates into the holidays and celebrating different events, things that are relative to the culture.
How do you come up with ideas for doodles?
We all have our own ways of coming up with inspiration, but for me it's definitely doing the research into that particular culture or that particular day or that particular holiday. If it's a holiday that is recurring such as Valentine's Day or a Halloween doodle, I think one of the things that we always try to do is to come up with something fresh and new. And the way we get inspired to do things like that are just collaborative. We just bounce ideas off each other.
Do you ever take stances on social or political issues with doodles?
We'd probably never do that. Again, we're not trying to make any kind of statement. We want to celebrate things that are fun and a reflection of the Google culture.
When you say Google culture, what do you mean?
There's a certain fun and quirkiness involved in everything we typically do. We do a lot of collaboration. The environment here at Google revolves around innovation and technology and that's what we try to reflect through our doodles. We try to reflect that particular type of culture. That's why we celebrate a lot of inventors. We do a lot of technology doodles.
[via CNN]
