The Creator Google Logos: Dennis Hwang

All those beautiful doodles that show up at Google home page on festivals and special occasions are made by Dennis Hwang, a webmaster from Google team.

In 1998, when the company was founded, Sergey Brin created a basic logo using open source image editor GIMP. It remained standard logo for a long time. During Burning Man Festival of 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin designed the first doodle in order to notify users of their absence. Since then, Dennis Hwang was assigned to create Google logos.

Dennis Hwang, born in Tennessee (USA) moved to Gwacheon (South Korea) when he was five years old. He came back to US for his graduation when his father received research scholarship in the United States. He joined Google as intern student in 2000 and later become international webmaster and was responsible for managing international site content. He holds degree from Stanford in arts and computer science.

Knowing the fact that Dennis also had his majors in arts, Larry Page and Sergey Brin asked him to come up with the doodle for Bastille Day in 2000. Since then he is incharge for drawing doodles for festivals, birthdays, Olympics, independence days and national holidays.

After lot of research, brainstorming and search for images on Google, Dennis Hwang sketches the subject in combination with letters of Google. He uses digital tablet and software’s like Painter or Photoshop to transform ideas into art. His favourite characters are O and L which can be manipulated easily. He finds G the most difficult to deal with, and gives little attention to E because of its location.

Interestingly, drawing doodles makes only 10 percent of his job. His main responsibility in company is to manage content as an international webmaster. Some designs take only few hours to complete while others take much time due to their importance.

His favorite doodles are mainly artists’ birthdays like Magritte’s and universal appealing Olympics 2008 Google logos.

You can have look at Dennis tips for designing doodle and samples at here and here or check out how he draws these doodles here :