Google doodle showing picture of a cake by Wayne Thiebaud, to celebrate Google's 12th birthday
Photo: VAGA NY/GOOGLE
Users visiting the search
engine's home page are greeted with a picture of a cake whose candle
represents the 'L' in the Google logo.
The California-based company was first incorporated as a privately held
corporation on 27 September 1998.
Thiebaud's work,
reproduced by permission of VAGA, Visual Artists and Galleries Association,
includes many cakes, most painted in the 1950s and 1960s.
He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his work is earlier than the likes of Andy Warhol.
It is a more straightforward 'doodle' than the recent ball game animation that distracted millions of internet users.
Before that, Google marked the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the "buckyball", a spherical dome of exotic molecules of carbon, with a special moving design.
The animated logo replaced the logo's middle O letter with an orange ball. It then formed into the "buckyball", which is a form of carbon composed of 60 atoms.
By scrolling their mouse across the logo, users could twist and turn the ball, which has replaced the search engine's usual logo on its home page.
The new interactive doodles follow one produced in May to celebrate the 30th birthday of Pac-Man.
That design, which went public on Friday, May 21, 2010, was the first doodle to be fully interactive. The Pac-Man character could be moved by using the arrow keys on the user's keyboard.
Google Doodles have become newsworthy in their own right after the technology firm started using the customised versions of its logo to mark what it considered significant occasions.
The first of them was used in August 1998 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the firm's founders, designed one for the Burning Man Festival.
In October 1999, it produced a Halloween doodle: the first after the firm switched to a new logo.
The first "Christmas card" doodle was presented in 1999, on Christmas Day, featuring a snowman and flakes drifting onto the name.
Mother's and Father's Day doodles appeared in May and June 2000 respectively before the firm started noting more esoteric and, let's face it, interesting occasions.
On October 7, 2009, it did "Google" as a bar code to recognise the anniversary of its invention in 1948 by Bernard Silver, which some saw as a significant shift away from human language and towards machine language.
On Saturday, June 5, 2010, a hologram replaced the logo to honour Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holograms.
Most recently the firm marked the 71st anniversary of the Judy Garland film The Wizard of Oz with a doodle of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow walking down the Yellow Brick Road towards a landscape with "Google" on it. Perhaps it's a metaphor.
Mary Shelley, the British author of Frankenstein, had the 213th anniversary of her birth celebrated by a spooky Google Doodle late last month.
He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his work is earlier than the likes of Andy Warhol.
It is a more straightforward 'doodle' than the recent ball game animation that distracted millions of internet users.
Before that, Google marked the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the "buckyball", a spherical dome of exotic molecules of carbon, with a special moving design.
The animated logo replaced the logo's middle O letter with an orange ball. It then formed into the "buckyball", which is a form of carbon composed of 60 atoms.
By scrolling their mouse across the logo, users could twist and turn the ball, which has replaced the search engine's usual logo on its home page.
The new interactive doodles follow one produced in May to celebrate the 30th birthday of Pac-Man.
That design, which went public on Friday, May 21, 2010, was the first doodle to be fully interactive. The Pac-Man character could be moved by using the arrow keys on the user's keyboard.
Google Doodles have become newsworthy in their own right after the technology firm started using the customised versions of its logo to mark what it considered significant occasions.
The first of them was used in August 1998 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the firm's founders, designed one for the Burning Man Festival.
In October 1999, it produced a Halloween doodle: the first after the firm switched to a new logo.
The first "Christmas card" doodle was presented in 1999, on Christmas Day, featuring a snowman and flakes drifting onto the name.
Mother's and Father's Day doodles appeared in May and June 2000 respectively before the firm started noting more esoteric and, let's face it, interesting occasions.
On October 7, 2009, it did "Google" as a bar code to recognise the anniversary of its invention in 1948 by Bernard Silver, which some saw as a significant shift away from human language and towards machine language.
On Saturday, June 5, 2010, a hologram replaced the logo to honour Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holograms.
Most recently the firm marked the 71st anniversary of the Judy Garland film The Wizard of Oz with a doodle of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow walking down the Yellow Brick Road towards a landscape with "Google" on it. Perhaps it's a metaphor.
Mary Shelley, the British author of Frankenstein, had the 213th anniversary of her birth celebrated by a spooky Google Doodle late last month.