May 31, 2026
Kamini Roy's 155th Birthday · October 12, 2019
I made this page because of Kamini Roy.
It was October 2019. I'd opened Chrome for something stupid. Checking a flight or looking up a stock price, I can't remember. The Google logo was different that day. A drawing of a woman in a white sari, holding a book against her chest. Behind her, rows of other women in saris fading into the background. I clicked it. Her name was Kamini Roy. She was born in 1864, in what's now Bangladesh. In 1886, when she was twenty-two, she became the first woman in India to graduate from college with honours. She spent the rest of her life writing poetry and arguing that other Indian women should be able to study and vote. I had never heard of her, which embarrassed me a little. I read her Wikipedia for an hour. I forgot what I'd opened Chrome for.
This happens to me all the time.
I grew up in India, and as a kid the doodles on the holidays were a thing. Diwali. Holi. Independence Day. I'd wake up early on those mornings, mostly because school was off, and check the family computer to see what Google had drawn. The animated ones were the best. There's still a part of me, embarrassingly, that thinks they're the best part of the day. Then one day I figured out the I'm Feeling Lucky button. I'm pretty sure I didn't leave the room for the rest of the afternoon.
Anyway. On April 10, 2019, humanity got the first photograph of a black hole. A Doodler at Google named Nate Swinehart sketched the doodle for it on his morning commute. He pitched it from his car. Drew it in about two and a half hours. The animation was live on Google's homepage within six hours of his email. I opened Chrome that day to do something I've since forgotten, and the first thing I saw was that doodle, before any of the headlines. The doodle was, weirdly, clearer than most of them.
I've learned more from clicking Google's logo than I'm comfortable admitting.
There are 6,342 of these. Each one is a person, a holiday, a discovery, something somebody at Google decided was worth putting on the front page of the internet for one day, usually in just one country. Each one drawn by a real human being. Sometimes they spent weeks. Sometimes hours.
Google calls those people Doodlers. There are fewer than fifty of them inside Google, plus hundreds of guest illustrators who get brought in for specific doodles. Their work gets seen, in a single day, by more humans than the Mona Lisa has been seen in person across its entire 500-year life. Then they archive the doodle and move on to the next one. Almost none of them put their name on the work.
Google Doodles celebrates everyone. We figured somebody should celebrate the Doodles. And the Doodlers.
Thank you. For all of it.
Akash, sheets.works
Right now, on Google's homepage somewhere in the world. And every other doodle that's ever run on this date.
Most doodles are drawn by Google's in-house Doodlers, but for many of them, Google brings in a guest illustrator. Often someone from the country or culture being celebrated. Here are 59 of them. Click any one to see the doodle they made.
The in-house team inside Google has fewer than fifty people. Some have been doing this for over a decade. One of them designed the playable Pac-Man you wasted an afternoon on in 2010. Others sat with cultural consultants in Ghana for a week to get the Independence Day right.
Sundar Pichai cannot tell them what to make.
He said this himself, in an interview at IIT Kharagpur. The CEO of Google does not get to put his thumb on what the world sees on the homepage tomorrow. The Doodle team decides. That, more than anything, is why we made this page.
A few stories about the Doodles and the people who make them. Sourced where useful.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to Burning Man. They drew a stick figure into the Google logo as their out-of-office. That was the first Doodle. It ran before Google was officially incorporated as a company.
Two years in, Google's interns started drawing doodles for holidays. One of them, Dennis Hwang, drew the Bastille Day doodle. He kept getting asked, and ended up the first official Chief Doodler. The role exists today.
The first animated Doodle ran on Halloween that same year, drawn by guest illustrator Lorie Loeb. Five pumpkins, animated GIF-style. The homepage moved for the first time.
Pac-Man's 30th anniversary. The first playable Doodle. Roughly a billion people played it. So many people came back asking for it that Google made the page permanent. Wikipedia ↗
November 2009. NASA announced they had found water on the moon. Google's first same-day Doodle went up that afternoon.
April 2019. Doodler Nate Swinehart sketched the black hole Doodle on his commute to work. He pitched it by email. Drew it in ~2.5 hours. Live within 6. Live Science ↗
The 2021 Tokyo Olympics Doodle was a full 16-bit JRPG made with Tokyo animation studio STUDIO 4°C. Two years in development. Largest interactive Doodle ever made. Wikipedia ↗
In an interview at IIT Kharagpur, Sundar Pichai was asked whether he could direct the Doodle team. He said no. The Doodle team has editorial autonomy. The CEO of Google does not get to choose what runs on the homepage.
The Doodle character that appears most often across the archive is a calico cat called Momo, named after a real cat belonging to Doodler Juliana Chen. Momo's debut was the 2016 Halloween Doodle, Magic Cat Academy.
"Doodler" is the official title for the artists on the team. Not a nickname. It's what's on their business cards.
The team accepts ideas from the public at doodleproposals@google.com. They get hundreds of submissions a day.
Some Doodles take years to plan. Some take hours. Champion Island took two years. The black hole took six hours. The first one, in 1998, took an afternoon.
On any given day, multiple different Doodles are running. Mother's Day 2026 ran in 27 different countries with one design. National Day Doodles only show in one country, on one day, with one design.
Google has filmed short documentaries about how some of the doodles came together. Twenty-three of them, sourced from the team's YouTube channel.
Every Google Doodle since August 30, 1998. The whole archive, here. Pick a year, type a name, or just keep scrolling.
Tomorrow the logo will be a logo again, or it won't. If it isn't, click it. You'll spend a minute learning about a person you'd never heard of, in a country you've never been to, on a day that means something to someone else. Then you'll close the tab and search what you came to search for, and forget. So will I. That is the whole thing.
Always free. No junk. Past drops: the listening museum of boot chimes, every Pokémon sorted, the Pixar cry chart, every ChatGPT, this one. Whatever's next.
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