Les Paul Playable Guitar Google Doodle

Google Software Engineers and Doodle Team (2011)

On june 9, 2011, the Google Search Page featured the strings of a guitar in the shape of the Google logo, in honor of the 96th birthday of musician and electric guitar pioneer Lester William Polsfuss, alias Les Paul. In several countries, that logo was playable and users could record a 30-second snippet of their creations and share with friends. The Washington Post published a guide how to play the guitar logo. Plenty of people have posted their creations to YouTube, there have been several thousand videos uploaded in one day. Due to popular demand, the guitar logo was left for an extra day on the Google page in the USA and received a permanent home one day later. A tutorial about how the doodle is created has been published on the devlup website.

The customised logos on the Google homepage are called doodles. These decorative changes to the Google logo celebrates holidays, anniversaries, famous artists and scientists. The Google doodle story started in 1998, when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin played with the corporate logo to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. In 2000, the current Google webmaster Dennis Hwang began celebrating and marking worldwide events and holidays with doodles. Creating doodles is now the responsibility of a team of talented designers with creative lead Ryan Germick. The team is still supervised by the webmaster Dennis Hwang and by vice-president Marissa Mayer, Google’s first female engineer, who leads Google Company’s product management efforts on search products. Since the beginning, over 300 doodles for google.com in the United States and over 700 have been designed internationally. Doodles have been seen by millions of users and reached cult status, with fans waiting with great interest to see the next creation on the Google homepage.

All the published doodles can be seen at the Google website, including a full history and links to the current and past doodle contests open to public communities. In March 2011, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles.

Google has had a number of innovative doodles on its homepage in the past years, but none of them has been quite as addictive or mesmerizing as the Les Paul one. The best doodle forever is the title of numerous blog and magazine contributions about this topic. This doodle is also one of the most complex and interactive. Alexander Chen from Google Creative Lab, the Google software engineers Kristopher Hom and Joey Hurst and doodle team lead Ryan Germick programmed and designed this innovative artwork.

Other notable recent doodles celebrated Charlie Chaplin, Martha Graham, John Lennon, Richard Scarry, Robert Bunsen, Thomas Edison, Jules Verne, X-Rays, PacMan, …