When I was growing up I collected everything. I had shoeboxes filled with thousands upon thousands of postcards; I had a plastic grocery bag filled with cheap keychains; I had a giant can filled with hundreds of soda can pop tabs; My bed was covered with stuffed lions; and I kept every note slipped to me by a friend or crush through all of middle and high school stashed away in a secret hiding place.
These days I’ve given up on the postcards, the keychains, the pop tabs and the lions, and I’m too old to pass notes. However, I do still have one collection that’s become something of an obsession– I collect Googles. Each time Google puts up a special logo for the holidays, a famous birthday or some other commemorative event I control-click and save the logo into a “Googles” folder on my desktop. I can’t help it, they’re just so cool!
Inspired by today’s logo, created to honor the birthday of Hans Christian Ørsted, the Danish chemist and physicist most famous for discovering that magnetic feilds can be induced by electric currents, I decided to put together a post of some of my favorite Google doodles for your viewing pleasure.
The first Google doodle that I saved, and the inspiration for my Google collection, was the Marc Chagall Google posted on July 7, 2008 in honor of Chagall’s birthday. Chagall is one of my favorite artists and when I saw this logo I just had to save it.
Just a few weeks later, on July 28, 2009, Google celebrated the birthday of Beatrix Potter. Beatrix Potter was an English author and illustrator best known for the book Peter Rabbit. The illustrations on this Google doodle took me straight back to my childhood and I added it to my collection!
Some of my most favorite Googles are those which, like the Chagall and Beatrix Potter doodles, pay tribute to artists and illustrators. The following are a few of my favorite artist and illustrator Googles:
René Magritte – November 20, 2008
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Jackson Pollock – January 28, 2009
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Mary Cassatt – May 21, 2009
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Dr. Seuss – March 2, 2009
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First Day of Spring – March 20, 2009 (Based on The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle)
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I also really like when Google changes its logo to something that is almost completely unintelligable– no Gs, no Os, no L no E . . . But you can still tell, without a doubt, that it’s the Google logo. The following are a few of my favorite examples:
25 Years of Tetris – June 6, 2009
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Samuel Morse, Morse Code – April 27, 2009
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Moon Landing, July 20, 2009
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The Google Doodles are created by Dennis Hwang, Google’s international webmaster. He creates about 50 doodles per year. You can view an archive of Hwang’s Google Doodles here.