Google’s Doodles – A Contemporary Digital Art Form.
Google is one of the largest tech companies today. And the homepage has been our regular dosage of significance of the day through their special logos. Celebrating holidays, anniversaries, and the lives and work of famous artists. The Google doodles are fun and inspiring. These doodles are informative, innovative, and some downright ingenious. They provide people with information of not just personalities but even important days.
The idea for the Google doodles originated in 1998, even before the company was incorporated. It was born when the founders of Google, Larry and Sergey played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at burning man festival. It was a stick figure drawing behind the second “o” in the Google logo. The first doodle was relatively simple, this gave birth to the idea of decorating the logo to celebrate notable events from all around the world.
In 2000, Larry and Sergey asked Dennis Hwang, an intern at the time, to produce a doodle for Bastille Day. It was greatly appreciated by its users and Dennis was appointed as the chief doodler and doodles started showing up more regularly on the Google homepage. The doodles initially highlighted familiar holidays, but now they celebrate wide arrays of events and anniversaries. Gradually the demand for doodles has been rising, and the team of illustrators have created over two thousand doodles for the Google homepage around the world.
Google doodle celebrated his 96th birthday of guitar legend Les Paul with a playable and recordable doodle. Abstracted into many guitar strings, bridge, a pick up, and a record button.
Alexander Calder, a modern sculpture was honoured by Google on her 113th birthday. He was famous for his hanging sculptures. The users could interact with the doodle by tilting their laptops or moving the cursor to make it sway side to side.
Google doodles have been a topic of debate as contemporary art. By the beginning of 2010 Google doodles increased in both frequency and complexity. From a simple stick finger drawing evolved into intricate, detailed, and elaborate designs and creative concepts along with interactive and animated games. This global showcase of date-specific illustrations can certainly be considered as a creative expression. Today we often perceive the work of illustrators and graphic designers as “modern-day art”. This is what the team of Google doodlers consists of. Even though Google doesn’t proclaim these doodles as art. It’s more of a well-designed customer service, the main purpose behind these doodles were to humanise brand’s image. This makes it difficult to neglect the underlying corporate purposes. Which further makes it difficult to call it, by all technicalities, a form of contemporary art.
Nevertheless there is a scope of these doodles to be part of the future digital arts in a wider sense. Google doodles are a very prominent part of the internet and the visibility is enormous. It might be time to take these doodles as more than just a branding strategy for its creativity and intricate illustrations.
