How To: Change the Google Logo to Your Favorite Google Doodle All Year Round

We all love it when the Google logo changes to celebrate or commemorate special events— pop-culture touchstones, civic milestones, scientific achievements and holidays— their latest one for this holiday season is a Christmas card to everyone— an interactive Google Doodle with 17 artworks from different artists, each depicting a seasonal greeting from a variety of cultures and countries.

This new Google logo appeared earlier today and will remain on the search engine's homepage for the next couple days.  Michael Lopez, the man in charge of the Google Doodles, said "We want to end the year with a bang."

The design took five artists about 250 hours to create, but it's well worth the time since it will be opened bu hundreds of millions of people during Christmastime.  Even you.

Each Christmas card depicts a holiday scene, and clicking on each image will bring up an instant Google Search for their associated phrases:

• Up on the housetop
• St. Basil's Cathedral
• Acropolis
• Buche de Noel
• Mt. Fuji
• Pierogi
• Great Wall of China
• Indian dance styles
• Sahara desert
• Oud
• Chili pepper
• Venice gondolas
• Nepal
• Chilean vineyards
• African kanga
• Henna lamp
• Sydney Harbour

For Google, the goal is to burnish its brand image and engage the legions of people who conduct more than a billion searches a day, without offending any of them.  Google estimates it has created more than 900 doodles since 1998, with 270 of them running in 2010.

In the past, holiday doodles have used gift bows and snowmen to celebrate the season.  But since becoming chief doodler 18 months ago, Mr. Lopez, 30-years-old, has upped the ante creatively and technologically.  This year marked the first video doodle, videogame doodle and hologram doodle.

Mr. Lopez's concept for the doodle is a representation of the Google logo through 17 interactive portraits of holiday scenes from around the world.  For months, Mr. Lopez had envisioned unveiling it in stages over three days, ending on Christmas.

But when executives and others at Google saw the nearly completed doodle last week, they made a key change: the entire doodle needed to go online in one posting.  Suddenly, after working for six months, Mr. Lopez and his team were racing to finish.

To get the full story, read the article article at the Wall Street Journal.

OR...

If you love those Google illustrations and want to see them every time you perform a Google Search, then look below for the directions on how to make it happen in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

How to Change the Google Logo to Your Favorite Google Doodle

Mashable has a great HowTo for making your favorite Google Doodles a constant image on your Google Search homepage.

There's a clever little, unofficial Greasemonkey script from Google employee Tiffany Lane that will let anyone using the Firefox or Chrome web browsers personalize their Google homepage with those classic Doodles— all year round!

Here are the required downloads and links needed for changing your Google Doodle logo:

• Greasemonkey Add-on for Firefox
• Favorite Doodle script for Greasemonkey
• Favorite Doodle Google Chrome Extension
• Google Doodle Gallery

To get the full scoop and step-by-step instructions, check out the full article on Mashable.com.