Google doodle for 2015 New Year's Day (final)
Google doodle for 2014 New Year's Eve (final)
"Farewell, 2014! We're celebrating the last day of the year with an animated recap of some of this year's top trending searches, including the 2014 World Cup, the Philae robotic lander, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and Flappy Bird, with a shout-out to the Mars Orbiter Mission. Happy new year!" - quoted from Google doodle's archive page
"Farewell, 2014! We're celebrating the last day of the year with an animated recap of some of this year's top trending searches, including the 2014 World Cup, the Philae robotic lander, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and Flappy Bird, with a shout-out to the Mars Orbiter Mission. Happy new year!" - quoted from Google doodle's archive page
Collaboration with Sophie
I still remember the day that Sophie Diao reached out to ask if I was interested in helping with Google's global 2014 New Year's Eve and 2015 New Year's Day doodles. No words can describe how happy I was to get an email from Sophie, who's an amazing artist / Google Doodler that I greatly admire. Of course I replied yes, and that is within the same night she emailed me. I had never imagined that I could doodle for Google AND work alongside with my art hero. Doodling for Google has been a dream of mine since forever.
Looking back, the process was not easy compared to the other projects I have ever done, but I'm really thankful that Sophie gave me a lot of guidance along the way, and that I get to work with her. This is by far the biggest project I have ever done, so it's definitely worth all the hard work. Thanks so much Sophie and Google!
Sketches
2014: initially we were going to include a couple other events for the 2014 top trending search recap, such as the lego movie and rainbow looms.
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2015: one of my first concepts was to include a buffering loader to show that we have to wait for the year to buffer to see what happens, since there aren't any events to include yet. (in comparison to 2014's events recap) The question marks around the doodle represent all the unknown events of 2015.
But in the end, we decided to go without the loader and question marks, as it was confusing - the loader might make people think that there is another bigger doodle loading, so we went with celebratory new year elements instead. (fireworks)
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Below are some process animations before achieving the final result.
