In the world of the internet, the arrival of any special day or festival means a fresh look for Google's homepage logo. This perfect blend of art and technology — the Doodle — has become a familiar culture worldwide. Yet this timeless tradition began from an entirely ordinary need.

Twenty-eight years ago, on August 30, 1998, the first Google Doodle that touched history was published. At the time, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had decided to attend the Burning Man festival held in Nevada, United States. While they were away from the office, the server temporarily went down, and as a strategy to convey a message to users, they added a stick figure to the homepage logo. By drawing the festival's symbolic figure behind the second ‘o’ of the main logo, they let users know that the founding team was temporarily out of the office.

In its early days, the Doodle was an extremely simple static image, with no animation or clickable feature. Later, Google's public relations officer Dennis Hwang brought change to the tradition. On July 14, 2000, he designed a special logo for Bastille Day, celebrated in France. Seeing its success, founders Page and Brin entrusted him with the responsibility of making Doodles regularly. Over time, Google built a special team of artists and engineers called ‘Doodlers’ to manage this work.

A new chapter in Doodles began on October 31, 2000, when Halloween was celebrated with the first animated Doodle. Then, on May 21, 2010, the first interactive Doodle was created for the 30th anniversary of the famous video game Pac-Man, where users could play the game directly. Around the same time, the practice of adding hyperlinks to Doodles was introduced — clicking on a Doodle would take users to a related search page.

Over the past two and a half decades, more than five thousand Doodles have been published highlighting world leaders, scientists, artists, and the cultures of different countries. These special logos, spread across regional and global levels, have built a unique identity for the technology company before the international community. Approaching three decades, this innovation is no longer limited to being merely a logo of an information-search technology — it has carved a place in history as a living document of art and global history. Doodles can also be seen on various occasions in Bangladesh. The first Doodle about Bangladesh was published on March 26, 2013, on the great Independence Day.

Source: Google Doodle Archive