Brand Logos

Google Doodle Homage to Les Paul

By Delphine Hirasuna | June 9, 2011September 4, 2014

Since 1998, Google has been regularly posting doodle logos on its homepage, which is why today it put up a playable and recordable tribute to guitarist Les Paul on what would have been his 96th birthday.

The custom reputedly started when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin designed and posted a doodle of the Burning Man Festival in 1998 to alert users of their absence in case the servers crashed. Since then, doodle logos have appeared to honor the birthdays of famous figures from Gandhi and John Lennon to Michael Jackson and Edvard Munch and to celebrate significant holidays and events worldwide. Lately the doodle logos have become more elaborate. On February 8, Google ran an interactive doodle honoring sci-fi writer Jules Verne’s 183rd birthday, and on April 15th, it commemorated Charlie Chaplin’s 122nd birthday with its first video doodle. As far as we know, the homage to Les Paul is the first playable doodle. As if we don’t have enough reason to go to Google; now it’s to check out its doodle logo for the day.

Humor

Google Stories One Letter at a Time

By Delphine Hirasuna | June 28, 2010September 4, 2014

A clever bit of collaborative advertising between Google and Pixar, the latest Google search story video was timed to the release of “Toy Story 3” and features the familiar voices of Andy’s toys. It runs just one-minute long and is devoid of any fancy animation. A mini-preview of the next “Toy Story,” the video introduces us to key characters and hints at the plot and happy outcome.

Google search stories originally started out as a series of online videos about the product and its users. One search story, “Parisian Love,” got so many hits during the first three months that it played on YouTube that the company decided to break its rule about not running TV ads and aired it on the 2010 Super Bowl. What’s brilliant about the Google search stories are their utter simplicity and charm. The “searchers” always remain faceless and anonymous, yet their stories unfold through letters clicked into the search box, forming words that reveal tales of romance, adventure travel, job changes, health concerns, and personal passions. Viewers become voyeurs to the searchers’ life, yearnings, paranoia, interests, peccadilloes, and wild imagination, following their logic to delightful conclusions. “Every quest is its own story,” claims Google’s YouTube channel, which invites visitors to create their own search story. Actually, that is something we do everyday, often unaware of how much that says about where we are coming from.

Design Quizzes

Quiz: A Bodacious Test of Slang and Typography

By Delphine Hirasuna | August 26, 2009September 4, 2014

Since time immemorial kids have developed their own slang language to communicate amongst themselves and make the older generation feel really out-of-it. If you want to be gnarly, you have to get with the program. Gotta know what’s phat to be cool. Dig it! Same goes with type fonts. Certain faces are so closely associated with an era, that like zoot suits and Nehru jackets, they become signatures of a decade. For designers, such typefaces serve as graphic devices to subtly evoke images of an era without going overboard with clichés. See if you can match these slang phrases with the decade in which they were most popular, and if you are really feeling sharp, name the typefaces too.

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Design Quizzes

Quiz: Know Your Brand Alphabet

By Delphine Hirasuna | August 5, 2009September 4, 2014

About 12 years ago, we presented a quiz titled “Alphabet Soup,” (Vol. 3, No. 2) to see if our readers could identify a company simply by the first logotype letter in its name. Since then, new companies, and whole new industries, have risen to the forefront. Some of the brands featured in that quiz don’t exist anymore. So, we have created a new alphabet quiz out of logotypes from some of today’s best-known companies. Keep in mind that the most recognizable letter is sometimes in the middle of the name. If you’re stumped, take a peek at the answers.

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