Press coverage:
The Week | Wall Street Journal

Original Google Doodle Artist – Ian David Marsden

In 2000, Google decided it might be fun to let little hand-drawn illustrations—and occasionally short, unfolding stories—appear on the homepage around the Google logo. These drawings marked holidays, cultural moments, and special events. They were early Google Doodles, created for a homepage that was still famously simple: a white page, a search field, and not much else.

That year, Susan Wojcicki, then Google’s marketing manager (and later CEO of YouTube), called me in my studio in Santa Monica to ask if I would be interested in creating these Google Doodles. Google was not yet the household name it would become—but I was already a Google user, and the idea of bringing illustration onto that clean, minimal stage felt genuinely new. I said yes.

For the full year of 2000, I created the Google Doodles that appeared on Google’s homepage—sometimes as standalone illustrations, sometimes as short themed runs that unfolded over multiple days. They remain part of the official Google Doodle archive and are often cited as early examples of how illustration and storytelling can humanize a global tech brand.

This page is a curated gallery of my Google Doodles from 2000, with direct links to the official archive wherever available, plus contemporary press coverage.

Jump to the Google Doodle Gallery ↓