Google recently posted a video offering an inside look on how Google Doodles Get Made, focusing in on the Lotte Reiniger Doodle. How Google make’s its Doodles is actually quite involved as you will see in the video at the end of this article.
This behind the scenes look is a product of Nat & Lo, two enthusiastic and funny Google employees who are using their 20% time to give viewers an inside look at various products and things happening at Google. Nat is Natalie Hammel, a writer at Google Creative Lab who’s been with Google since 2010. Nat’s partner in this project is Lorraine Yurshansky (Lo), who is the Consulting Executive Producer/Creative, Google Creative Lab. Lo’s been with Google since 2008.
The duo have done cool and interesting behind the scenes videos on Terra Bella, which is Google’s Satellite Startup, Waze, Google Translate and many more. They started doing the Google Behind the Scene’s videos in July 2015:
Nat & Lo:
For a while now we wanted to know more about how the Google Doodles get made. Recently we got to meet the Doodle team and see some of the Doodles they are working on. In this episode (below) we are giving you an inside look on how the Lotte Reiniger Doodle was made. Later this summer we are going to create a couple more episodes about upcoming Doodles from the Doodles team.
For this episode let’s travel back in time to Germany 1899…
Dancing pencils reading books is the Google Doodle of the day happily celebrating National Teacher Day, often simply called Teachers’ Day. Teachers’ Day is actually part of the NEA’s Teacher Appreciation Week for 2016. This is not to be confused with the United Nations World Teachers Day which is October 16, 2016.
Today’s Google Doodle artist is Nate Swinehart which Google says, “Honors the invaluable civil servants all across the United States who’ve dedicated their lives to molding a thoughtful, compassionate generation of citizens. And to making sure everyone does their homework”.
Ironically, Detroit school teachers are not celebrating Teachers’ Day because they aren’t going to school again Tuesday. They are protesting their belief that without a state bailout teachers won’t be able to paid while they are on summer break.
Alice Paul would have been 131 today, and Google is honoring the women’s rights activist with a special doodle on its homepage and other search properties.
Alice Paul led the 1910s campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment, prohibiting discrimination of sex when it comes to voting. After its passage, she led the National Woman’s Party and fought for an equal rights amendment.
Paul went to prison multiple times, suffering abuse for the cause, as described in the following presentation.
The Alice Paul Institute says of Paul, “Alice Paul was the architect of some of the most outstanding political achievements on behalf of women in the 20th century. Born on January 11, 1885 to Quaker parents in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, Alice Paul dedicated her life to the single cause of securing equal rights for all women.”
“Few individuals have had as much impact on American history as has Alice Paul. Her life symbolizes the long struggle for justice in the United States and around the world. Her vision was the ordinary notion that women and men should be equal partners in society,” it adds.”
Paul died at her home at the age of 92 in 1977 after suffering a stroke. You can read a good bio of her life and accomplishments at the Alice Paul Institute’s website.
Lucy Maud Montgomery, better known as L.M. Montgomery, is being honored today with a video Google Doodle.
The author, born on November 30th, 1874, is best known for her novel Anne of Green Gables and the subsequent series. Monday’s Google Doodle is celebrating what would be her 141st birthday.
The beloved Canadian author first published Anne of Green Gables in 1908, after a few years of trying. The book became an instant hit. The novel tells the tale of 11-year-old Anne Shirley, an orphan who is mistakenly sent to a family farm on Prince Edward Island. Her Green Gables series spanned eight books – the final one being published in 1921. A “lost” book, the ninth in the series, was found long after her death and published in 2009.
Montgomery also published other novels, and was a prolific short story writer. Her various short story collections contains hundreds of works.
Check out Google’s Doodle:
Montgomery died in 1942, reportedly from coronary thrombosis. A note found by her bedside has caused speculation as to a possible suicide.
“I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best,” it read in part.
Duke Kahanamoku (or Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku) is the subject of a new Google doodle honoring his legacy as the man who is largely responsible for spreading the sport of surfing. Kahanamoku, who won five Olympic medals for swimming, and was also known as “The Duke” and “The Big Kahuna,” was born one hundred and twenty-five years ago today.
While water-sports were his main claim to fame, Kahanamoku had quite a collection of professions.
As Google explains, “The story of Duke Kahanamoku–the Hawaiian who, in 1912, first drew the world’s collective gaze upon the art of surfing–reads like mythology. Born in Honolulu in 1890, he is credited in over a dozen feature films, surfed the world’s most imposing swells before Californians knew what surfing was, won five Olympic medals in swimming and was elected sheriff of his beloved home county thirteen times.”
“The Big Kahuna was a tremendous athlete, to be sure, and by all accounts staggeringly cool, but he also had a proclivity for heroics–one morning in 1925, just as dawn crept into the summer sky over Newport Beach, a 40-foot fishing vessel called the Thelma found herself in the grip of a sudden and violent squall,” the company adds. “Waves hammered the Thelma’s deck, and the vessel succumbed to the thrashing breakers, stranding its crew in the surf. The Duke, who watched from the shore as he prepared for that morning’s ride, rushed headlong into the maelstrom with his surfboard and, along with three friends, managed to wrest twelve men from the clutches of the Pacific.”
In other words, the man was a true hero, but as if that weren’t enough, as Google notes he also played a role in helping the Hawaiian Islands achieve statehood in 1959 about nine years before his death.
Here’s some rare footage of what is said to be Kahanamoku at Waikiki Beach in 1939:
Google is showing the doodle throughout North and much of South America as well as in much of Europe, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Japan. August 24 also happens to be Ukraine Independence Day, and in that country, Google is honoring that with its own doodle.
Nellie Bly is the subject of Google’s doodle for May 5, as the day would have been the journalist’s 151st birthday.
Bly was her pen name. Her real name was Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman. She was best known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days and an an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within its confines. She is considered a pioneer and is credited with starting a new kind of investigative journalism.
Bly began writing for The Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1885 before moving to New York and working for New York World. The trip around the world and the mental institution story were for the latter. From Biography.com:
One of Bly’s earliest assignments at the paper was to author a piece detailing the experiences endured by patients of the infamous mental institution on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) in New York City. In an effort to most accurately expose the conditions at the asylum, she pretended to be a mental patient in order to be committed to the facility, where she lived for 10 days.
Bly’s exposé, published in the World soon after her return to reality, was a massive success. The piece shed light on a number of disturbing conditions at the facility, including neglect and physical abuse, and ultimately spurred a large-scale investigation of the institution as well as much-needed improvements in health care. Later in 1887, Bly’s series was later reprinted as a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House, published in New York City by Ian L. Munro.
The trip around the world came in 1889 as an attempt to break the fictional record of Phileas Fogg from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, which was published roughly sixteen years prior.
Bly married millionaire indsutrialist Robert Seaman in 1895 at the age of 35, and retired from journalism until returning after Seaman’s 1905 death. She started working for the New York Journal in 1920 before dying of pneumonia two years later at the age of 57.
Google’s doodle is animated, and features a lovely song performed by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs:
The lyrics go: “Someone’s gotta stand up and tell ’em what a girl is good for. We gotta speak up for the ones who’ve been told to shut up. Oh, Nellie take us all around the world and break those rules ’cause you’re our girl. Oh, Nellie take us all around the world with you. We want to make something of ourselves too. Oh, Nellie you show us just what you would do. Oh, Nellie you show us just what you would do.”
This is reportedly the first original song to be written for a Google doodle. It’s definitely a good one to start with, and it will be interesting to see if it happens more often. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Arcade Fire work with Google on one at some point given that the band has worked with the company on variousprojects in the past.
The doodle from artist Katy Wu, also reportedly represents the first time one has utilized stop-motion animation. Wu told CNN Bly “gave women a space in newspapers when they were generally preserved for men’s perspectives. She gave women a voice in current events and media and dared to do a lot of things that women weren’t generally allowed to do.”
The beauty of Google’s doodles is that they provide a format to spread mini-history lessons to users all over the world, and you can believe that a lot more people know about Bly’s story than did yesterday.
Who invented the piano? Bartolomeo Cristofori di Francesco of course! Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who didn’t know. A lot of people don’t know that (if you did, give yourself a nice pat on the back).
Google is hoping to make sure a lot more people do know who invented the piano by giving Bartolomeo Cristofori a doodle for his 360th birthday. Heres’ a video showing the animation, and talking a bit about Cristofori’s life:
Bartolomeo Cristofori was an Italian, who made musical instruments. Even before he invented the piano, that’s what he did. He invented two keyboard instruments before he began his work on the piano. As described on Wikipedia:
The spinettone, Italian for “big spinet”, was a large, multi-choired spinet (a harpsichord in which the strings are slanted to save space), with disposition 1 x 8′, 1 x 4′;[5] most spinets have the simple disposition 1 x 8′. This invention may have been meant to fit into a crowded orchestra pit for theatrical performances, while having the louder sound of a multi-choired instrument.
The other invention (1690) was the highly original oval spinet, a kind of virginal with the longest strings in the middle of the case.
Cristofori also built instruments of existing types, documented in the same 1700 inventory: a clavicytherium (upright harpsichord), and two harpsichords of the standard Italian[6] 2 x 8′ disposition; one of them has an unusual case made of ebony.
The first appearance of the actual piano came in 1700, at least on record, though a diary entry indicates mention of the instrument as early as 1698. Cristofori had built three pianos by 1711. Here’s a 1722 Cristofori piano in the Museo Nazionale degli Strumenti Musicali in Rome:
It’s worth noting that Google is also celebrating Star Wars Day on its homepage with the “May the Fourth be with you” link (as pictured at the top). Of course it’s celebrating by trying to get you to buy the Star Wars films from Google Play.
The Pony Express is the latest Google Doodle to be featured on the search engines homepage to commemorate the 155th anniversary of the mid-1800s cross-country mail delivery system.
But, what you may not know is the Google Doodle is actually a game you can play.
Before e-mail, people actually wrote letters and counted on the country’s mail delivery system to get their messages to others. Even before the modern U.S. Postal Service used automobiles to deliver the mail, the Pony Express was used in the 1800s to get the mail safely delivered.
“In honor of the 155th anniversary of the Pony Express on Tuesday, Google created an animated Doodle game that commemorates the mail delivery service,” reported Time magazine. “If Googlers click on the Wild West-themed Doodle, they can help a pony deliver mail across America.”
The game is simple and pretty easy to finish, but collecting every single letter on your way may be challenging.
Animator Nate Swinehart explained the history of the Pony Express and offered a behind-the-scenes look at the Doodle process in a video:
According to history.net, the Pony Express began mid-1800s when three men came up with the idea to open up a mail delivery system that reached from the Midwest all the way to California. The three men — William H.Russell, Alexander Majors & William B Waddell — designed a system of over one hundred stations, with each station approximately 240 miles long, across the country.
Today marks the 155th Anniversary of the Pony Express mail service, which inspired the Pony Express roller coaster. pic.twitter.com/GjlUFDj2ld
“The Pony Express employed about eighty deliverymen and had around four hundred to five hundred horses to carry these riders from one post to the next,” says the site. “Monthly pay for these riders was fifty dollars, which were good wages at the time. Although this method of carrying mail was dangerous and difficult, all save one delivery made it to their destination.”
So how did you do on the Google Doodle Pony Express game?
Google is trying to make sure you don’t get anything done at work today – something at which the company excels. Today’s homepage features a playable Google Doodle honoring the most famous mail service of all time.
When was the first mail delivered via the Pony Express? 155 years ago today, in fact. To celebrate this important day in history, Google has put out a fun little game featuring a horse and letters.
There are 100 letters to collect in all, but I’ve only managed to snag 87. Watch out for the bandits with lassos.
The Pony Express helped connect the East and the West in the mid-1800s. Using a series of relay stations, mail, newspapers, and other goods were delivered via horseback. Starting in St. Joseph, Missouri, and winding up in Sacramento, California, the Pony Express was in operation for around 18 months.
The Pony Express could get your letter across the country in about 10 days. Pretty impressive for 1860.
“The notion of triumph through adversity is so inspirational. So when William H.Russell, Alexander Majors & William B Waddell founded the Pony Express on April 3rd, 1860, they set in motion a wonderful yet daunting method of communication. What a concept–riders with letters on horseback racing from California to Missouri and vice versa to deliver mail on time! True to their word, the first mail arrived on April 14th. The Pony Express felt like a great game concept to us at Google. We’ve made time-based games in the past so our new idea was simple. Collect letters, avoid obstacles and aim for the ultimate 100 letter delivery! We know everyone is busy these days but the Pony Express needs YOU. And ultimately, whatever happens in life, what’s more important than earning trust and respect from a horse?” says the Google Doodle team.
The Doodle can be seen in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines.
With New Year’s Eve here, Google is celebrating the end of the year with a doodle on its homepage pointing users to 2014 trending topics. It’s an animated doodle that shows the word Google turning into “2014,” with each number representing a different topic.
If you click the doodle, it takes you to a search results page with one of Google’s answer boxes at the top. This displays the top five trending topics for the country with the option to look at other countries’ lists.
The top five topics for the United States are:
1. Robin Williams
2. World Cup
3. Ebola
4. Malaysia Airlines
5. Flappy Bird
Earlier this month, Google released its lists from around the world. Here’s a look at the global top ten:
You’ll notice on Google’s homepage today that there’s also a link to the Google Trends 2014 site.
Google is showing a doodle on its homepage today, honoring the holiday spirit, showing a reindeer pulling some children in a sleigh. They didn’t get too creative with the Google letters this time, instead opting for a simple red banner with the word Google at the top. It’s animated:
When you click the Doodle, it takes you to search results for “‘Tis the season!” According to the first result, which is from Wikipedia, ‘Tis the Season may refer to the lyrics from the carol “Deck the Halls” or ‘Tis the Season, a Vince Gill and Olivia Newton-John album. I like to think Google is honoring the latter.
Speaking of Google and lyrics, did you know that Google is now showing song lyrics directly on search results pages, and linking them to Google Play, where you can buy the song you’re searching for? It’s probably not the Christmas present owners of lyrics sites were hoping to get this year. Google isn’t doing this for Deck the Halls lyrics at least.
Today’s doodle is the first in a series of holiday doodles this week. Here’s what tomorrows will look like:
Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian-born artist and theorist who is known as one of the key figures in abstract art, has been given his own Google Doodle on the site’s homepage in honor of his 148th birthday.
Born 1866 in Moscow, Kandinsky studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. It was when he took a job as a professor at the University of Dorpat near the turn of the century that Kandinsky began painting in earnest.
Most know Kandinsky for his abstract work, but he didn’t start out painting the complex pieces like the ones that serve as inspiration for today’s Google Doodle.
in 1896, Kandinsky made a big career shift and left Moscow for Munich, where he would attempt to enroll in art school. In the decade that followed, Kandinsky’s style would begin to change – as colorful landscapes would give way to abstraction.
In 1921, Walter Gropius asked Kandinsky to come to his Bauhaus school – an offer Kandinsky accepted. There, he taught classes, painted, and worked on theory.
When the Bauhaus school was shut down by the Nazis in 1933, Kandinsky moved to Paris. He would later become a French citizen and stay in France until his death in 1944.
Annie Jump Cannon is the subject of a doodle today on Google’s homepage, as the search giant celebrates her 151st birthday.
Cannon was an astronomer whose work was considered instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. She, along with Edward C. Pickering, is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme. This is said to be the first “serious attempt” to organize and classify stars based on temperature.
Cannon’s astronomy career spanned 40 years, and during that time, helped women gain respect within the scientific community. She died in 1941, the year after she retired. The American Astronomical Society presents an award in her name to female astronomers each year.
Space has been of particular interest lately when it comes to Google doodles. The company recently ran one to celebrate the Philae probe, which soft-landed on a comet.
Corita Kent, an artist, nun, and educator, is being celebrated on Google’s homepage today with a doodle on her birthday. She was born on November 20,1918, and passed away in 1986.
Also known as Sister Mary Corita Kent and born Frances Elizabeth, Kent worked with silkscreen or serigraphy, and is credited with helping to establish it as a fine art medium. Her work was popular during the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s.
Kent also designed the USPS annual “love” stamp in 1985.
Philae, European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Rosetta mission probe, has soft-landed on a comet. This is the first time in history this has been done.
It didn’t take Google long to whip up a Doodle to celebrate this amazing feat.
“Our ambitious Rosetta mission has secured a place in the history books: not only is it the first to rendezvous with and orbit a comet, but it is now also the first to deliver a lander to a comet’s surface,” said Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General. “With Rosetta we are opening a door to the origin of planet Earth and fostering a better understanding of our future. ESA and its Rosetta mission partners have achieved something extraordinary today.”
“After more than 10 years travelling through space, we’re now making the best ever scientific analysis of one of the oldest remnants of our Solar System,” said Alvaro Giménez, ESA’s Director of Science and Robotic Exploration. “Decades of preparation have paved the way for today’s success, ensuring that Rosetta continues to be a game-changer in cometary science and space exploration.”
Here’s an ESA video featuring some highlights.
Rosetta was launched on March 2, 2014. It traveled 6.4 billion kilometers through the Solar System before arriving at the comet in August. ESA has a lot more on the mission here.
Google has a doodle up for Veterans Day. Interestingly, clicking it takes you to a search for “Veteran’s Day” with an apostrophe, complete with a “Did you mean: Veterans Day” prompt.
I’m sure it’s a common error, and Google does return results for “Veterans Day,” but I can’t see I’ve ever seen Google point a doodle to a search that required a “did you mean”.
If you’ll notice on the image of the homepage, Google is displaying a link under the search box. This takes you to a Google Careers page for veterans, which Google says, “make great Googlers.”
From there, veterans can find more info on opportunities in engineering, infrastructure and data centers, sales, operations, etc., including how to apply.
This morning, Google is also displaying a bar at the top of the screen asking people to donate to help fight Ebola.
You may be wondering, “Where do I vote?” Google knows this question is on many people’s minds across the United States today as the midterm elections are underway.
Google is taking the opportunity to turn its homepage into a tool for would be voters, who may not know exactly where they need to go. Rather than making the doodle take you to search results for “Election Day,” which is a format Google often employs for holiday doodles, it takes you to a query for “Where do I vote?”
That query doesn’t just bring up a classic search results page with ten blue links (fewer and fewer queries do these days as it is). Instead, Google gives you a search box right at the top for a “Polling Place Lookup,” which lets you enter your address and find the proper venue.
Strangely, if you simply search for “polling place lookup,” Google doesn’t deliver this box, but lists a page from vote411.org. This is presumably the website Google would have traditionally taken users to before it decided it had to start injecting its own services and answers into as many search results as possible.
In fact, for the “Where do I vote?” query, Google lists a handful of local results after the search box, followed by several “in the news” results. Then, the vote44.org result appears.
Site owners are often distressed when they see Google placing its own stuff in the search results rather than sending them the traffic, but in this case, provided its supplying accurate information to users (it did for me), it’s probably fine. People need to know where to vote, and if Google can get them that info faster, then that sounds good to me.
While we’ve still got a while to go here in the U.S., it’s already Halloween some parts of the world, and Google is showing a variety of doodles as opposed to one static image as usual.
If you navigate over to Google.com.au, you can check out the different designs. They’re all animated from the looks of it. Just keep refreshing to bring up different versions.
You can see the animation below.
Clicking one of the doodles will simply take you to a Google search results page for “Halloween,” which will inform you of the date in one of Google’s instant answer boxes, followed by the Wikipedia article for the holiday, some News results, and some image search results. Add “movie” to the query to bring up a carousel of Michael Myers (and Season of the Witch of course) results.
Jonas Salk is the subject of today’s Google Doodle as the company celebrates what would have been his 100th birthday. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1995.
Salk was an American medical researcher and virologist, who is credited with discovering and developing the first successful inactivated polio vaccine. He went to New York University School of Medicine, where he is said to have stood out because of his academic abilities as well as the fact that he went into research rather than becoming a practicing physician.
When Salk developed his vaccine, polio was considered the scariest public health problem in the U.S. 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with paralysis from an epidemic in 1952. Most were children.
As far as the actual Doodle goes, I find it a bit difficult to identify the Google logo in this one. It’s one of the most difficult the company has ever displayed in my opinion. Still, it’s a very fitting image honoring someone that had a tremendous impact on the well-being of kids.
The first day of autumn is being celebrated by fans of the season and Google alike. The search engine is displaying an animated doodle in honor of the occasion.
In the animation, we see a guy turn the gay leaves of the Google trees into beautiful autumn colors before they fall to the ground. The company’s name is made out of the left-over trunks and branches.
Once you play the animation, and click through to the search results, Google gives you the actual date in one of its quick answer boxes, and informs you that it is indeed the first day of autumn or the Autumnal Equinox.
The Autumnal Equinox happens when the planet’s axis is not tilted either towards the sun nor away from it. This makes it so that the day and the night are close to equal lengths. More on the Equinox here.
Today, Google is honoring famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy with a Doodle documenting some of his most important works, novels like Anna Karenina and War and Peace.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana in 1828 into Russian nobility. Both of his parents died when he was very young, and he spent his childhood in the care of relatives. In his early years he studied law for a bit, had some troubles with gambling, and eventually joined the army. He first achieved some sort of attention with semi-autobiographical works like Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth in the mid 1850s.
Tolstoy is most widely known for his hefty works Anna Karenina and War and Peace, thought of by many as two of the greatest novels of all time. The former tells the story of a married woman and her affair with a wealthy Count and the latter tells the stories of multiple families through the lens of the Napoleonic Wars. War and Peace is considered one of the most important works of fiction of all time – as well as one of the longest.
Today’s Doodle recognizes these two works, as well as The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Tolstoy is also remembered as a philosopher, short story writer, playwright, and essayist. Tolstoy died of pneumonia at a train station, at the age of 82.
,_oil_on_cardboard,_later_mounted_on_wood_panel,_48_x_69.5_cm,_The_Merzbacher_collection,_Switzerland.jpg){kind=link}
