New Delhi, December 17 – Animating something is pretty easy. All you need is a little bit of flair for creativity and knowledge of some software tools. But it is very difficult to animate something that will be seen by millions and millions of people, something that makes a statement on behalf of the world’s biggest online company, and something that has potential to really “break the internet”.
At Google, it is the job of Kristopher Hom to animate this “something”. He is the man who puts the magic in the Google doodles so that we, the web users, can poke and prod at the G and O of the Google logo, watch the animation and delight ourselves.
“While animation is not really the most difficult part, the whole process to create a doodle from the scratch can take up to 3 months,” Hom recently told IndiaToday.in. Google first put a doodle – which was actually a modified company logo – on the search page in 1998.
Google’s founder Larry Page and Sergei Brin were going out of the town to attend the Burning Man festival and they decided to let their co-workers know about it by modifying the logo. But the idea became popular.
Gradually, Google started putting out more and more doodles. Most were conceived and created not by any special team but by Googlers working in various departments. People just came up with ideas and created something that was then put up on the homepage.
Until 2009, all Google doodles were static images or, in some cases, GIFs. In 2009 Hom joined Google as an engineer. Though he wasn’t part of the Google’s doodle team, by that time the company had some illustrators and artists working full time on doodles.
“Me and doodle people were sitting in the same office and they saw me playing with animations. After some conversations the doodle team asked if I would be interested in creating an animation for the home page. I agreed and the Newton Doodle was the result,” says Hom.
The Newton Doodle was very simple. And yet, it conveyed the idea beautifully. Putup on the website in 2010 to mark the birthday of Isaac Newton, the doodle showed Google logo with a branch of an apple tree. A few seconds on the page and then it showed an apple falling down.
“The doodle team liked it. We got positive feedback and then the team was like, ‘why don’t you do this again’,” says Hom. That was the start of animated doodles. In the coming months, Hom started playing with more and more complex doodles.
For example, the team created the Pacman doodle, which was actually a game. “It was very challenging and so was Rubik’s Cube because these required lots of processing power and we had to make sure they would run well on a user’s computer in a web browser,” says Hom.
Despite the popularity of Google doodles Hom doesn’t want to overdo it. He says that a doodle is a bid to surprise users in a pleasant way. “We don’t put out a doodle daily but when we do, we hope to delight and surprise people… It is also a Google’s way to celebrate and mark important dates,” he says. The Big idea is “to make everyone happy for around 10 seconds”.
It also takes a lot of time – usually around months — to create an animated doodle. Though the static ones are easier and less time consuming. These takes only around a month.
Considering that Google wants its doodles to connect with local users, nowadays the process to create a doodle often starts in its regional offices. However, the company has only one team for creating doodles and that is based in its Mountain View office in the US.
So once the local Googlers have some ideas for new doodles, they pass them on to the Doodle team in the US office. “We then create prototypes, decide if we want to do it in the animated way or not, pass around the prototypes to see how they work and finalise a doodle if it is something that we believe will delight or inform users,” says Hom.
The whole process takes between one to three months, unless it is a special case – like that of Philae landing on a comet or India’s Mars Orbiter reaching the red planet – in which case the process is expedite and completed within days.
-INDIA TODAY
