A Holiday Card From Google

    For Micheal Lopez, creating this year's holiday card came down to the wire. The design took five artists about 250 hours. It will be opened by hundreds of millions of people. You're on the list.
Mr. Lopez is in charge of what Google Inc. calls its "doodles," the illustrations that occasionally adorn the search engine's logo in the U.S. and abroad. Doodles appear throughout the year to commemorate holidays, pop-culture touchstones, civic milestones and scientific achievements. The holiday doodle—its most ambitious one yet—will go up on its home page Thursday morning at 9 a.m. eastern time. It will remain on the site for 2½ days.

   "We want to end the year with a bang," says Mr. Lopez, whose title is chief doodler.
   For Google, the goal is to burnish its brand image and engage the legions of people who conduct more than a billion searches a day, without offending any of them. Google estimates it has created more than 900 doodles since 1998, with 270 of them running in 2010. Some appear globally, and others are tailored for local markets outside the U.S., such as Kenya Independence Day.

     In the past, holiday doodles have used gift bows and snowmen to celebrate the season. But since becoming chief doodler 18 months ago, Mr. Lopez, 30-years-old, has upped the ante creatively and technologically. This year marked the first video doodle, videogame doodle and hologram doodle.
On what would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday in October, the former Beatle's glasses were the "Os," and clicking on the logo launched a 30-second video with an "Imagine" soundtrack.

     Mr. Lopez's concept for the doodle is a representation of the Google logo through 17 interactive portraits of holiday scenes from around the world. For months, Mr. Lopez had envisioned unveiling it in stages over three days, ending on Christmas.

   But when executives and others at Google saw the nearly completed doodle last week, they made a key change: the entire doodle needed to go online in one posting. Suddenly, after working for six months, Mr. Lopez and his team were racing to finish.

   Discussions about the holiday doodle started back in July. Mr. Lopez met with his team of four artists, who include a recent Rhode Island School of Design graduate and children's book illustrator. They batted around a few ideas, then decided the illustrations of celebrations should focus on food, dance, architecture and textile.

      Mr. Lopez divvied up the 17 scenes among his staff, personally taking responsibility for six. As the team met over the following months to discuss regular doodles, artists would give updates on the status of their holiday sketches. Jennifer Hom, who was assigned Italy, drew Venetian gondolas on the wipe board, with the curve of a bridge feeding into a "G."

      In mid-December, the doodle team met one morning in a conference room on campus here to weigh in on the illustrations. Some were just being conceived; others were well in progress. A red drawing of three Indian women dancing, with henna accents framing the scene, was projected from a computer onto a wall. Mr. Lopez shared a concept for southern Africa, imagining a solitary man in tribal dress and sandals. "I wanted to keep the shape of the actual body very geometric."
"It's odd for it to be a single person," another artist said.
"Maybe it should be a family. That's more holiday-like," Mr. Lopez agreed.
"If they're really a family, there needs to be a kid playing Game Boy," someone called out.

    As the meeting ended, Mr. Lopez was rushed but jocular. His team had about 100 more hours of work to devote to the project—not including the hours Google programmers would put into writing the code and building the interactive infrastructure. But he predicted they might wrap it up even a week before Christmas. "I think we're in good shape," he said.

     But last week, some at Google raised concern about how much time people spend on their computer Christmas Day. Many people would miss the completed doodle, they worried.
"I thought, 'Is my mom going to be available to play this on Christmas Day?' " says Mr. Lopez. "The answer is, no, she'll be making me food!" So the team worked past Wednesday afternoon to re-engineer the next day's doodle.

      Toying with Google's logo, created by independent graphic designer Ruth Kedar in 1998, is part of the company's culture. In August 1998, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to adorn the company logo with a symbol of Burning Man, a festival held annually in the Nevada desert that they were attending. Through the second "O," they inserted a figure with arms akimbo, like that associated with the festival.

     In 2000, they asked Dennis Hwang, then an intern, to integrate other doodles into the logo from time to time. As with the Burning Man doodle, there's often an air of mystery as to what is being depicted. When users are stumped, they can click on the doodle to get more information.
Holidays are a mainstay of the operation, but they're tricky territory for a large company trying to appeal to a broad audience.

     Two years ago, Eman Hassaballa Aly, a 31-year-old social worker from suburban Chicago, rallied for a doodle devoted to Eid, a Muslim holiday celebrated twice a year. She urged her Facebook friends to email Google—which was unaware of the efforts—yet eventually dropped the matter. "This was not a negative thing. No one is saying Google is anti-Muslim," Mrs. Aly says. "We still would love to have a doodle and to acknowledge the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world."

      Mr. Lopez says while the team endeavors to be as inclusive as possible, "The questions is, 'How do we celebrate these holidays without religious symbolism,'" he says.
Though Google publishes an email address (proposals@google.com) for user submissions, few unsolicited ideas make it to the home page.

      In the fall, supporters of the Girl Scouts of the USA took to Twitter and Facebook to urge others to email Google to ask for a doodle of founder Juliette Gordon Low to appear on what would have been her 150th birthday on Oct. 31.

     Mr. Lopez, who says he was unaware of the campaign, notes that Halloween would be a tough day to highlight a Girl Scout.
 
     But he's not ruling out a Scouting-related doodle at some point. "It's sweet," he says.
Doodles also like to serve up doses of nostalgia. In 2009, after a doodler read an article about the 25th anniversary of videogame Tetris, Google contacted Honolulu-based Blue Planet Software Inc., which controls the license to the game, asking permission to create a Tetris-themed doodle. "We cleared copyright in two hours, the fastest ever," says David Kwock, general manager of Blue Planet.
In 2003, Mr. Hwang celebrated the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick. On the double helix that comprised the Os in Google, a small section of a strand crossed another at the wrong spot. After a torrent of emails from geneticists, an artist scrambled to fix the rendering and repost it.

      For Thanksgiving this year, Google rolled out a doodle over three days. Day one showed the logo made from photographs of Thanksgiving groceries; the next day it was photographs of the process of baking a pie, and the third day, Thanksgiving, showed a complete turkey-and-stuffing feast.

     Clicking the doodle on the first two days revealed recipes created by Ina Garten, author of the "Barefoot Contessa" cookbooks and star of the TV show.
What a doodle can do for a brand, well "you can't possibly quantify it," says Ms. Garten says. "The cool factor alone is incalculable," she says.

      Ms. Garten got an email from Google asking if she was interested in collaborating on a Thanksgiving doodle. Two doodlers flew to East Hampton, N.Y., and met with Ms. Garten and her photographer, whom she called in to help.
"I thought, 'It's six letters, how hard can it be?' " Ms. Garten says. It took them from sunrise to dinnertime, she says. When the first day's doodle changed at midnight on the dot, she was captive in front of the computer to watch.