The pictures, which occasionally replace the familiar logo of the Google search service, are the result of the work of a group of employees of this company. Ideas for such images are selected during the discussion or come from users of the service who have the opportunity to send their wishes by e-mail. According to Google employees, one of the criteria for choosing a theme for a picture is surprise.
For the first time, the logo of the Google search service was supplemented with a picture in 1998, when the thirteenth Burning Man festival was held in the United States. Legend has it that the idea belonged to the founders of the company, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who added a stylized figurine of a man with raised arms to the second letter "o" in the logo. The picture resembled the logo of the festival, which took place from the last Monday of August to the first Monday of September in the Black Rock Desert of the American state of Nevada, and its appearance was supposed to indicate that no one was in the company office. This story took place even before the official registration of Google, which took place on September 4, 1998. However, the idea of periodically changing the main picture of the search service stuck.
Two years later, the founders of the company asked Denis Khvan to make a picture for the main page of the service in honor of Bastille Day. The search engine users liked the image, and its author had to start creating similar images for Google. At first, the images were dedicated only to major holidays, later they began to be posted on the service page in honor of events like the birthday of the inventor of the zipper or the anniversary of a popular dessert.
During the existence of Google, more than a thousand pictures have been replaced on the search engine site, the creation of which could require from a couple of hours to a month of work. To draw them, both graphic editors and more traditional tools are used. The image dedicated to the anniversary of the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was painted by Jennifer Hom with oil paints on canvas.
A small team of talented illustrators and technicians working in the company's California office bring the element of surprise to the content of the search engine home page. The creative director of this group is designer Ryan Germick, who can be seen in the 2007 video about the Street View service. The short silent film used to complement the Google logo for Charlie Chaplin's birthday starred everyone who was part of the design team in 2011.
