Internet search giant Google is marked its 12th anniversary with a 'doodle' painting of a cake designed by well known Los Angeles artist Wayne Thiebaud. Google has placed a cake on the home page of the search engine and the candle on the cake represents the 'L' in the Google logo.
Google was first incorporated as a privately held corporation on 27 September 1998. The work of 89-year-old Thiebaud is reproduced by permission of VAGA, Visual Artists and Galleries Association. The veteran artist is interested in objects of mass culture and is actively associated with the Pop art movement.
It may be recalled that Google marked the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the "buckyball" with a special moving design. "Buckyball" is a spherical dome of exotic molecules of carbon. At that time the logo was animated and it replaced middle O letter in Google with an orange ball. The animation then formed into the "buckyball", which is a form of carbon composed of 60 atoms.
The doodle which was launched to mark the 12th anniversary follows one produced in May to celebrate the 30th birthday of Pac-Man. That design was put on Google's home page on May 21, 2010. It was the first doodle to be fully interactive as the users could move the Pac-Man character using the arrow keys on the user's keyboard.
Doodle's were first used in August 1998 when the firm's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, designed one for the Burning Man Festival. Google produced a Halloween doodle in October 1999.
