The Best Art and Design Google Doodles Ever Created

Artists get honored on Google's homepage.

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Complex Original

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On August 30, 1998, Google employees ditched work and headed to Burning Man, the hippie gathering in Black Rock Desert, NV. They left a cryptic message on Google's homepage: Burning Man's symbol behind their logo. So rose the first Google doodle. "There was no master plan for doodles at that point," leader of the Google doodle team Ryan Germick told Time Magazine

Google doodles have since evolved, playing on designer Ruth Kedar's official red, blue, yellow, and green Catull typeface logo. From slight alterations to the search engine's homepage, to elaborate interactive and animated graphics, we give you The Best Art and Design Google Doodles Ever Created.

RELATED: The 30 Best Google Doodles of All Time

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Claude Monet

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Vincent van Gogh

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Leonardo Da Vinci

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Jackson Pollock

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Shepard Fairey

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Bob Ross

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Auguste Rodin

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Mary Blair

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Will Eisner

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Louis Daguerre

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Joze Plecnik

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Lola Mora

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Edward Gorey

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Rene Magritte

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Antoni Gaudi

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Giorgio Vasari

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Rembrandt

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Marimekko

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Maria Sibylla Merian

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Diego Rivera

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Mies Van Der Rohe

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Juan Gris

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Robert Indiana

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Robert Doisneau

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Akira Yoshizawa

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Peter Carl Faberge

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Gio Pomodoro

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Frida Kahlo

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Alphonse Mucha

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Eadweard Muybridge

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8. Eadweard Muybridge

Date: April 9, 2012

While Google's doodle for Muybridge's 182nd birthday is not so exciting at rest, when the graphic was clicked, the horses galloped into motion. A British photographer, Muybridge combined his still images to make sophisticated flipbooks that were essentially the first moving pictures. This Google doodle mimics his work Sallie Gardner at a Gallop.

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Gustav Klimt

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Takashi Murakami

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Keith Haring

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5. Keith Haring

Date: May 4, 2012

One of the '80s downtown artists in New York City, Keith Haring depicted the vibrant street culture of the city in his graphics. His technicolor works featured cartoonish figures that danced and grooved across his canvases. Google used Haring's iconic 2D figures to spell out the company's name. The animated drawings swayed across the screen with the same dynamism that Haring brought to his drawings.

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Brancusi

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Alexander Calder

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3. Alexander Calder

Date: July 22, 2011

Calder's Google doodle is a whimsical delight. Celebrating the inventor of the mobile, the doodle shows the company's logo as one of the artist's hanging designs. The interactive doodle spun like a true mobile when scrolled over with a curser.

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Martha Graham

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2. Martha Graham

Date: May 11, 2011

The rebel Martha Graham broke with the strict tradition of 19th century ballet, essentially inventing modern dance and setting the stage for what we know as contemporary dance today. To celebrate the dancer's 117th birthday, Google created a seamless animation of a woman dancing to form the company's letters.

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Saul Bass

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1. Saul Bass

Date: May 8, 2013

Graphic design master Saul Bass designed film credits and movie posters for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. His posters look like Kandinsky's woodcut prints for Der Blaue Reiter or Banksy's stencil graffiti. For Bass's 93rd birthday in May, Google's doodle mimicked the designer's signature style, with an animation that looked like one of Bass's opening credits.

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