From Santa Monica to Silicon Valley: The Origin of the First Google Doodles
In 2000, I was hired by Google to illustrate what would become their very first Google Doodles. Long before it was a global company, Google was still a bold new search engine looking to stand out. These homepage illustrations—hand-drawn, scanned, and delivered from my small studio in Santa Monica—marked the beginning of one of the most recognizable branding traditions on the internet.
Wall Street Journal Article: The Beginning – Google
The story was later detailed in The Wall Street Journal. At the time, Google’s marketing team was led by Susan Wojcicki—who would go on to become CEO of YouTube. Seeking a creative way to celebrate holidays and events, she asked her team for illustrator recommendations. My name came up, and soon I was invited to contribute some fun and experimental artwork for what would become the first ever Google Doodle: a fictional mind-reading feature called “Mentalplex.”
The early Doodles were created by hand—pencil, ink, and digital color in Adobe Photoshop on my dual-processor G3 Mac. I emailed GIF animations directly to Susan, who forwarded them to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They loved them, and thus began an exciting year of collaboration. For over twelve months, I served as Google’s unofficial “doodler-in-chief.”
Doodles for Holidays, Events, and Olympics
I went on to create Google Doodles for Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the Sydney Summer Olympics. These included a cartoon kangaroo—nicknamed the Kangaroodle—who performed a different sport each day on the Google homepage.
I worked directly with Wojcicki to shape each illustration. What started as a one-off joke grew into a beloved branding icon, and today, Google Doodles are created by a full internal team of artists, animators, and developers. But the origin of this idea remains rooted in the hand-drawn illustrations I was proud to contribute during Google’s earliest chapter.
At the time, I was also studying animation at the Academy of Entertainment and Technology at Santa Monica College. My focus was magazine cartooning, editorial work, and interactive design. Google didn’t yet feel like a bet-your-career destination—it was one of many exciting experiments happening across the early internet.
Still, this collaboration helped define a visual vocabulary for playful tech branding. It showed that a search engine could have a personality. And it’s gratifying to know that millions of people saw those drawings during a turning point in the web’s evolution.
Want to see more? → View the full Google Doodle gallery here.
Looking for custom illustrations, branded character design, or creative storytelling for your digital product or campaign? Contact Ian David Marsden to discuss a collaboration.
