For 16 days of the London 2012 Olympics the search engine giant Google has dedicated its logo to creating interactive ‘doodles’ for everyone to enjoy in order to celebrate the 30th Olympic Games.
Addictive and highly competitive people all over the world have been competing against each other posting their scores on Facebook and Twitter trying to better each other to get the best score out there.
The doodles themselves are created by a handful of doodlers who are located in the California office of Google. It is reported that the doodles themselves can take anything from a few hours to several months to create.
For each day of the 2012 Olympics a new doodle was created to represent a variety of sports from synchronised swimming to basketball. All of which are shown below.
The doodle’s creators prefer not to think of themselves as artist or designers but rather the “line between entertainment, arts, technology and graphic design”. Over 1000 have been produced in total and have celebrated a variety of people and events some of the most popular and memorable being:
- 122nd Birthday of Charlie Chaplin (The film stars the entire Google Doodle team with Mike Dutton playing Charlie)
- Freddie Mercury’s 65th Birthday
- Les Paul’s 96th Birthday
The beauty of Google Doodles is that they also help us remember some of the more forgotten about events on the calendar such as Emelia Earhart’s 115th Birthday and the inventor of the zip’s 132nd BirthdayIf like many in the MEC Manchester office you are having withdrawal symptoms from the Olympics and indeed the doodles, you can go to the Google Doodle website and play them for the time being to get your sports fix.
MEC’s Opinion The Google Doodle’s are a great example of changeable yet recognisable branding, barely any other global companies could alter their logo on an almost daily basis and still be so recognised. Google keep themselves fresh and interesting by providing that little something extra to their service.
