If you, like so many others, checked Google’s homepage today, you probably thought you were still hung over from the holiday weekend. You chased, you scrolled, but still you couldn’t catch the logo because it had atomized like a “Star Trek” transporter beam.
But if you went to the box to type in your search term(s), the design finally calmed down to settle into place and form those familiar letters that have redefined our search engine experience.
With the success of previous interactive logos, like May’s Pac-Man game, Google knows how to score a home run anytime it fiddles with its screamingly simplistic, brilliant home page.
Oh, and that Pac-Man game, it didn’t come without a cost to productivity. CNET reported on a study that found 4.8 million man (and woman?) hours were wasted in chomping away, which amounted to $ 120 million lost. As RescueTime, the company that cranked out that study, put it, “you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time.”
Thank goodness today’s logo isn’t a game, although we could see people spending some futile time chasing those dang balls.
Here’s some speculation we’ve culled from different sources:
- A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that the Google “Doodle” “is not related to Google’s birthday but is fast, fun and interactive, just the way we think search should be.”
- Finding out Google’s birthday, also as elusive as those little balls and dots, as it seems to be celebrated through September. Kind of like a birthday month! But according to Google’s own corporate milestones page, September is the month that they set up shop. The Guardian found this: “On September 7, 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California.”
- The Guardian also speculated:
The doodle actually consists of lots of pieces of a web page, each using a modern form of web coding called CSS3 – “Cascading Style Sheet” elements. Each circle is actually an element called a “div” – an element into which the page is divided – which contains an instruction in its associated piece of CSS3 to make it circular rather than square or rectangular. The code also contains instructions so that if the cursor is moved near to any of the “bubbles”, they try to move away.
The aim of the logo seems to be to draw attention to the importance of CSS3, an emerging standard which is being developed as the next version of the web language HTML, called HTML5, is being ratified by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Google has been eager to push HTML5 and CSS3, and its Chrome browser, because it offers many more possibilities in the design of web pages, which could be more interactive with less effort by designers. It has produced HTML5 versions of its video site YouTube so that they will be more mobile-friendly for people whose smartphones cannot cope with Adobe Flash content, usually used for video content on desktop computers.
- The Huffington Post also succumbed to the mystery around the bouncing balls, and wondered out loud if it was intended “to showcase JavaScript and HTML5 technologies.”
Everybody else continues to scratch their heads about this, but honestly, we’re just enjoying it. You?
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