Internet Changes Everything

Logo with a look for every occasion

Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

By Fran Yeoman
IT IS perhaps the most-viewed two square inches of advertising space in the world, and for those lucky enough to feature on it results can be dramatic.

Google’s homepage logo lost its letters for the first time this week and changed to a coded series of dots in the company’s signature colour scheme of blue, red, yellow and green in honour of Louis Braille’s birthday. As a result, the Royal National Institute of the Blind’s website, which was listed on Google’s links for more information, recorded a million hits — four times more than the previous day.

The Google masthead is altered to mark special occasions about 50 times a year, with the chosen subject brought to the attention of millions during its 24 hours of fame. All this makes Dennis Hwang a very powerful man. Mr Hwang, 27, has a highly technical day-job as a webmaster for the search engine. But he is also the “Google doodler”, a role he first took on when still a trainee at the company’s headquarters, Mountain View, California, in 2000.

Mr Hwang’s first creation was for Bastille Day, but the logos idea originated when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, went on holiday the year before. They posted a drawing of a Burning Man to alert Google’s then-modest band of users that they would be at the festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, and would not be in to answer the telephone if the website crashed. Mr Hwang has since adapted the logo to mark everything from World Aids Day to the Transit of Venus.

James Joyce has been in a Hwang design, on Bloomsday, June 16, the day on which Joyce’s novel Ulysses is set. Mr Hwang said: “It is surprising and gratifying to hear that an organisation like the RNIB can benefit that much from something as simple as a logo.”

Unsurprisingly, competition to appear on Google’s worldfamous homepage is fierce. “As soon as you do one organisation they all clamour for a logo,” Mr Hwang said. The space, he said, is “not for sale”, and will never feature a commercial subject.

The RNIB was delighted with the Google effect. Margaret O’Donnell, RNIB’s web manager, said: “We couldn’t have bought that kind of awareness or advertising.”

Mr Hwang does have to beware of political correctness and national sensibilities, however. Logos can be restricted to one country to avoid offending another, such as when the first “O” in the word “Google” became a poppy for Remembrance Day in Britain, but Mr Hwang’s doodles have on occasion caused complaints.

Irate e-mails soon alerted him to the existence of Belgian Flemish speakers when he commemorated the birthday of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands on the Dutch-language site, while autumn leaves on a Thanksgiving design prompted an e-mail from Australia pointing out that it was spring there.

Google’s influence is so extensive that “googling” has become a verb for internet searching, and last week the company was voted eighth in a BBC Radio 4 “Who Runs Britain?” poll, ahead of Gordon Brown, the Chancellor.

January 7, 2006 at 11:47 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home