Google is giving aspiring
student artists and inventors a rare chance to get their original
artwork on the heavily trafficked Google.com. The company is kicking off
a Doodle 4 Google
contest, and any student in the United States, grades kindergarten
through 12, can submit their own doodle between now and March 20.
The theme of this year's
contest is "If I Could Invent One Thing to Make the World a Better Place
..." If your idea is especially brilliant, you might want to patent it
before showing it off to the entire world or having it turned into a
top-secret Google[x] project.
In addition to a $30,000
scholarship and a tech grant to their school, the winner will make a
trip to Google headquarters and work with its Doodle team to turn their
drawing into an animation. The winning entry will appear on Google.com
on June 9. Continue.
Even as ads and other
detritus have filled search results, Google's search-engine homepage has
stayed clean, sparse and almost always free of ads. (Google has made
exceptions to push its Nexus 7, Nexus One and Motorola Droid devices.)
The classic multicolored
Google logo sits on top of the search bar in the middle of the white
page. But over the years, the logo itself has been altered for fun and
some smart brand marketing. These artistic "doodles" direct visitors to
information on topics they might normally have overlooked, from filmmaker Ingmar Bergman to writer Zora Neale Hurston.
"It's kind of like the
mission behind having a search engine that can bring you all the
information in the world," Google Doodler Sophie Diao said. (Her
business card actually lists "Doodler" as her job title.) "We can help
users find something or learn about things that they otherwise might
not."
The first Google Doodle
was posted in 1998, when the company founders took off for Burning Man
and decided to drop a stick figure into the regular logo as a sort of
"Gone Fishing" sign. Over time, the company started marking the
occasional holidays with decked-out logos, and the doodle took off.
Now they mark important
historical occasions and bring attention to people and topics that might
otherwise be overlooked, such as Simone de Beauvoir's 106th birthday, the 66th anniversary of the Roswell Incident and the 100th Tour de France.
The doodles are usually
created by a team of 20 Google employees, including 10 artists and three
engineers, at the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters.
They make about a doodle a day, though many are only for specific
regions of the world, so not everyone will see them on their Google.com
homepage.
You can see every doodle from around the world at Google.com/doodles.
The altered logos take
different forms. Most are static illustrations, but there are also
animations and games. Some of the biggest hits are elaborate interactive
doodles, like the winter-themed Zamboni game, which can take months to create. Clicking on a doodle brings up search results for that topic.
In addition to hosting
the winner for a day, the Doodle team will help an official group of
judges sort through entries and pick the best drawings. The public will
be able to chime in and vote on their favorites.
"We're looking for
doodles that kind of feel at once very personal and relatable and are
also a showcase of the student's creativity," Diao said.
Last year's Doodle 4 Google contest winner was 18-year-old Sabrina Brady,
who created an image of a returning U.S. soldier hugging his young
daughter. She has gone on to use her scholarship money to enter art
school.
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