Google Doodler Katy Wu tells us a little bit about the creative process behind making the Nelson Mandela doodle.
Getting to celebrate someone as monumental and influential as Nelson Mandela
must have been exciting, but also kind of intimidating. Can you tell me a
little about your experience working on this project?
A few months ago I was looking to work on a bigger project and the time
was right, so I got assigned to work on the Mandela doodle. At first I
thought I would have to make a very serious, somber sort of doodle and I
wasn’t sure what to do.
But after learning more about Mandela as a person I started to understand
that he was a man with a lot of character, and not always just a serious
figure. That started to give me more ideas about how to approach this
doodle.
Right. I remember you telling the doodle team in earlier pitch sessions about
some of his dance moves. What other kind of research did you do?
I read about Nelson Mandela online and in books to get a better idea of
who he was as a person. I also received a lot of help from our local
doodle manager in South Africa when it came to fact checking smaller
lesser known details about South African culture, history, and people.
What inspired the creative direction?
Something that stood out to me about Nelson Mandela was his eloquent way with
words. I thought his words gave a great insight into the kind of man he
was, so I wanted to focus the creative direction of the doodle on his
quotes against a backdrop of the history of South Africa.
While working on the Doodle I spent a lot of time looking at examples of
typography online and in design and typography books. It took a lot of
trial and error to figure out which typefaces can best abstractly convey
the sort of feeling or atmosphere I wanted in each illustration.
The font, artwork, and story had to work together on this project. Most of
the quotes are hand drawn except for the first 2 slides. By studying
how other fonts are designed I began to draw my own so that I could
better integrate the font with my own artwork.
Any hopes for how our users will respond to this doodle?
More googgle doodle related from India...
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