Meet the Doodler

Who are the people who turn an impersonal corporate logo into a global talking point? At the Google headquarters in Mount View,California,in an office teeming with nerds and geeks,a young team of four designers effect the transformation. The doodlers are arguably the most popular anonymous artists of the virtual world,and 24-year-old Jennifer Hom is the youngest of the lot.

On a winter day in Delhi,she sits on the lawns of a hotel,amid the sprawl of bean bags and moras,signing sketchbooks of schoolchildren who have taken part in the Doodle4Google India contest. She is more than a little hassled by the unusually warm sun but the petite Chinese-American has a ready smile,and is sporting about the many requests for photos and interviews. She is stumped only when a young boy asks her,not for an autograph,but a doodle. “Oh my god,give me some time!” she says in half-panic,and then laughs in relief when he agrees to settle for a signature.

Hom grew up in Long Island,New York,in a family of artists,“who encouraged me to be creative”. She had few friends as a child,and spent most of her time “drawing unicorns and fairies,and princesses.” After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA (Bachelor’s in Fine Arts),she joined the Google doodle team in August 2009. “The mandate of a Google doodler,” she says,“is to take fun seriously and to be open to new ideas,all the time.”

The current team of designers,under chief doodler Ryan Germick,is definitely serious about fun. If they have six letters to string into whimsy and fun every time,they look beyond static and cartoon-y artwork to interactive video- or animation-based work. Each time,their innovations have made news in geekdom. Last May,to mark the 30th anniversary of the ’80s cult arcade video game Pac-Man,they turned the logo into a mini-version of the game,that could be played by moving arrow keys or by clicking on the maze. “Ryan basically likes to break all the rules. At a time when we did static images,he wanted to do video games. He took his obsession to a whole new level with Pac-Man,” says Hom. In April,the team decided the only way to mark Charlie Chaplin’s 122nd birthday was to do away with the logo,and put up a silent video instead,which was shot on location in Niles,California,the setting of several of Chaplin’s early classics. Doodler Mike Dutton played Chaplin and Hom played the pretty seller of muffins he tries to impress.

Hom’s too been part of projects so cool that they get Googlers to nod in approval. This September,she let the flamboyant spirit of Freddie Mercury,and her imagination,break free in a one-and-a-half-minute animated doodle to mark his 65th birth anniversary. To the peppy soundtrack of Don’t stop me now,Mercury soars from the stage through the sky,rides a tiger through space,travels between planets,shoots green aliens and swerves between Gs,O and Ls. “‘I’m a shooting star,leaping through the sky like a tiger defying the laws of gravity.’ That’s one of the greatest lines,and I had to get that in,” says Hom,who supervised a team of three animators and four illustrators,watched Queen videos all day,and met band manager Jim Beach for a sense of what the band was like,and their attitudes on stage. She also doffed her creative hat to the video game industry of the time. “Queen was operating in the late ’70s,and early ’80s,when video games were immensely popular. To use this blocky,video-game aesthetic made sense. Mercury was so out-of-the-world and so action-packed that it made sense to use a video game to represent him. You can’t contain him in just one look,” says Hom.

That’s a long way from the first Google doodle. In 2008,Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin placed a stick-figure behind the second O to indicate that they were attending the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert — and as an oblique message that they were out of office. Not sure how many Google users got that. But over time,the doodles have become far more sophisticated,and turned into the quirky,even human face of a software behemoth.

The logos are now used to mark important or interesting days across cultures and countries. Over the last two months,the team has celebrated the Ugandan Independence Day,Italo Calvino’s 88th birthday,and Australian poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s 91st birthday ¯ all doodles were released in the countries of their relevance. Hom’s first doodle was to mark the 140th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi,a portrait in ink on khaki cloth. How does a team sitting in Mount View,California,get the cross-cultural connections right? “We completely understand that we are not experts on world culture. We all come from different cultures,but we don’t know the nuances. So what we do is we contact Googlers in that country,people who grew up there,and check with them,” Hom says.

Ideas for doodles come both from within the team,and from other Googlers. Anyone is welcome to write to Google with suggestions. “We take all the proposals seriously,I know because in our meetings we go through hundreds of ideas. If the time is right,if it’s a good year to celebrate,if it’s quirky and fun,we go ahead,” Hom says.

To be a doodler,you’ve got to be something of a geek,and Google was quite a revelation for Hom. “But geeks are really very creative people,” she says. The company DNA shows up in the work she does. She designed an interactive doodle last May to mark the 25th anniversary of the discovery of Buckyball or buckminsterfullerene C60,a spherical dome of exotic molecules of carbon discovered in 1985. In November 2009,when Hom read about the discovery of water on moon by Chandrayan and Nasa,she did a doodle which had five letters written in water,and the second O represented by the moon.

Doodling it might be called,but turning a logo into art is not the work of minutes. “The actual timeline of a doodle can vary greatly. On an average,it takes about four weeks. The longest time we have for a doodle is theoretically a year,which is the New Year’s doodle. We have a year to think about it. But we have to constantly reinvent it,” Hom says. The quickest doodle she had to come up with was the one to mark the discovery of water on the moon. “By noon,I got a phone call,asking me for a sketch,and a draft,and a final doodle by 4. Sometimes a year,and sometimes four hours. It keeps it exciting.”