Designing the Google logo

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Millions of us see the Google logo every day.

Ruth Kedar is the designer of the logo. The story of how she got the job starts in a martial arts class in 1998.

The Brazilian artist and designer was invited to meet company founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and asked to present them with some ideas.

Ruth tells Gill Kearsley her story of meeting the tech owners and how the design developed into a logo that became part of history.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.

Recent episodes explore everything from football in Brazil, the history of the ‘Indian Titanic’ and the invention of air fryers, to Public Enemy’s Fight The Power, subway art and the political crisis in Georgia. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: visionary architect Antoni Gaudi and the design of the Sagrada Familia; Michael Jordan and his bespoke Nike trainers; Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal; and Görel Hanser, manager of legendary Swedish pop band Abba on the influence they’ve had on the music industry. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the time an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at the President of the United States in protest of America’s occupation of Iraq; the creation of the Hollywood commercial that changed advertising forever; and the ascent of the first Aboriginal MP.

(Photo: The Google logo in 2006. Credit: Adrian Brown/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before this BBC podcast kicks off I'd like to tell you about some others you might enjoy.
0:05.0	My name's Will Wilkin and I Commission Music Podcast for the BBC.
0:08.0	It's a really cool job, but every day we get to tell the incredible stories behind songs, moments and movements,
0:14.7	stories of struggle and success, rises and falls, the funny, the ridiculous.
0:19.2	And the BBC's position at the heart of British music means we can tell those stories like no one else.
0:24.5	We were, are and always will be right there at the center of the narrative.
0:28.6	So whether you want an insightful take on music right now or a nostalgic deep dive into some of the most famous and
0:34.4	infamous moments in music check out the music podcasts on BBC Sounds.
0:48.8	Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Jill Kursley.
0:51.8	I'm taking you back to the late 1990s and the story of a logo familiar to billions of people around the world.
1:02.0	What do you do everything? to billions of people around the world.
1:03.0	What do you do every day?
1:05.0	More, talk, eat, drink, shock, and perhaps Google.
1:11.0	The verb to Google has entered the language.
1:13.4	It was not a big deal at the time. It was just another project.
1:19.1	Meet Ruth Kudar. She was born in Brazil and then also lived in Israel before moving to the United States.
1:27.3	She was living in California when she designed the logo for this huge company whose name has become commonplace worldwide.
1:35.0	The global brand with all of its current manifestations started in California at Stanford University,
1:42.0	where two students Larry Page and Sergei Brin both
1:45.4	decided that searching the internet could be done much better. So that's how the
1:49.5	search engine began. Millions of us see the logo every day. It's the letters of the company
1:55.0	name, each one a different color to the one it's next to. The logo's story
	...

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