Interface | Interaction | Design

Google has a tradition of celebrating all sorts of events with are known as Google Doodles. They are usually for the birthdays of famous people…

…or national holidays for countries around the world…

…or major events & various anniversaries…

A recent doodle that received a lot of attention was for one of these anniversaries. For the 30th Anniversary of Pac-Man on May 21, 2010, Google created a particularly adventurous doodle. People that searched with Google that day were treated to a miniature Pac-Man game coded using JavaScript.

Using sprites and a background image combined with the original background music and sounds (this was the only shockwave used in the project), they implemented the game around the Google logo. Of course there was talk immediately of how many man hours of work were likely wasted that day around the world due to the doodle. According to calculations by the makers of Rescue Time (a time tracking and management application), 4.82 million man hours were wasted due to the logo. In fact, they say:

• Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
• $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
• For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.

Discussions of productivity aside, the tribute was quite impressive and a great demonstration tool for JavaScript and what can be done in modern browsers without resorting to Flash.

The game is still available at www.google.com/pacman.

There have been a few other interactive logos for Google this year. The second most famous was their experiment with HTML 5 to promote their Chrome browser. On September 7, 2010 the logo was made of balls. When you moused over them, they ran from the mouse. This worked best of course in Chrome, but was also quite functional in Firefox and Safari. They haven't left this one live, but you can see several demonstrations of it on YouTube.

They followed the bouncing balls with a logo that started in greyscale. As you typed your search term the letters switched to color. Here's a nice video of it.