Google MentalPlex: the first Google Doodle project I created
Google MentalPlex went live on 1 April 2000 as an April Fool’s Day page on Google, inviting users to search not by typing, but by staring into a spiral and mentally projecting what they wanted to find. The original page is still archived by Google, complete with its mock-serious instructions: remove hat and glasses, keep your head still, concentrate on the circle, and let Google do the rest.
What I did not know at the time was that this odd little piece of work would end up with a second life. Guinness World Records now lists the Google MentalPlex Hoax as the first Google hoax, dated 1 April 2000. One does not generally expect to discover that a piece of one’s own work has wandered into the Guinness Book of Records, but there it is.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/114935-first-google-hoax
For me, MentalPlex also marks the beginning of something else: it was the first Google Doodle project I created. I have written more broadly about that period on my page about being the first Google Doodle artist, but MentalPlex deserves a page of its own because it was not just an early Google joke. It showed, very early on, that the homepage could carry an idea, a tone and a visual gesture without losing the simplicity Google was known for.
A joke played absolutely straight
MentalPlex worked because it never tried too hard. It did not shout, wink or explain itself to death. It simply borrowed the calm authority of an early Google interface and bent it slightly into absurdity. That was the joke. You were being asked to believe, for a moment, that the search engine had evolved beyond keyboards and into telepathy. A spiral, a few lines of dry instructions and a straight face were enough.
There was also a separate page of MentalPlex illustrations, showing examples of what users should and should not do. Even now, the whole thing still has a very particular flavour: simple, dry, faintly absurd, and oddly confident.
https://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/google_mentalplex
- Remove hat and glasses
- Peer into the MentalPlex circle. Do not move your head
- Project a mental image of what you want to find
- Click, or visualise clicking, within the MentalPlex circle
What stayed with me
What stayed with me was the restraint of it. MentalPlex was absurd, but it was not noisy. It relied on tone, timing and presentation rather than clutter. That has always appealed to me more than the louder school of humour. The piece did not try to batter its way into memory. It trusted the concept to do the work.
That combination of idea, image and delivery is something I have always cared about, whether the format is a homepage intervention, an illustration campaign, a short animation or a comic sequence. The tools change. The basic job does not. You are still trying to make something clear, memorable and distinct.
A strange and pleasing afterlife
MentalPlex began as an April Fool’s Day joke, but it has had an unusually long afterlife: still archived by Google, still remembered, and now sitting in the Guinness record books as the first Google hoax. For a piece built around a spiral and a deadpan lie, that is not bad going at all.
It also remains a useful thread back into the rest of my work. If you arrived here through the Google history and want to see where that thread leads, you can also explore my work in business illustration, explainer videos and hand-drawn animation, character and mascot design, comics and visual storytelling and my wider case studies.
MentalPlex still turns up in articles about Google’s best April Fool’s jokes. Thierry Vanoffe, for example, includes it in his Top 10 des meilleures blagues de Google pour le 1er avril. Which is reassuring. It would be faintly disappointing if a telepathic search engine had vanished without trace.
