Apr 22, 2012

Earth Day 2012

This Doodle’s Key Themes

An occasion to be particularly mindful of how we care for our planet, Earth Day is a time to show and practice appreciation for this sphere we call home. Fortunately for the doodle team, Earth Day is also the a chance to spruce up the homepage. Having celebrated this occasion with drawings of nature in previous years, we decided to get to the root of the inspiration and actually grow our doodle! Sure it was a simple and practically obvious solution for the logo, but it proved to be a surprising undertaking.

We're illustrators after all, not gardeners, and the team decided that I-- notorious slayer of cacti-- should lead the green-thumb charge.

This garden's too small! I grossly underestimated the size of the garden, thinking it would fit in a 7'-wide "pop-up green house." Our gardening experts gave us three reasons why this would not work: the flowers will attract bugs, we will violate health codes, and the flowers are much too big.

This garden's too big! How about outside then? My coworker, Stephanie, and I planted the massive garden on one of the balconies. Too bad we couldn't rig a camera high enough for the size.

This garden's just right! Alas, we moved the multi-hundred pound garden to another part of campus and replanted the whole thing! It was (relatively) smooth sailing from then on.

We hope that our rigorous efforts to plant the logo will inspire our users to grow their own flowers!

posted by Jennifer Hom