- July 22, 2011 09:56am EST
By Sara Yin
Remember those nursery mobiles you had hanging over your crib? Probably not. But today's Google doodle pays homage to those lulling designs.
Google's homepage doodle today, the first one made entirely through the HTML5 standard, celebrates what would have been the 113th birthday of the inventor of the moving mobile, American sculptor Alexander Calder.
The dynamic image renders one of Calder's most iconic works "The Star," which he created in 1960. If you're using an HTML5-compliant browser like Chrome or Firefox, you can use your mouse to control the direction in which the mobile sways.
"I like to think Calder would have appreciated today's doodle, since we're setting up shapes and abstractions and letting them act on their own," wrote Google software engineer Jered Wierzbicki, who chose the doodle, in a blog post. Wierzbicki said that as an engineer, he was inspired by the abstractions inherent in Calder's famous piecing together of wire and metal scraps, surrendered to kinetic energy.
"I coded up a very basic demo of a mobile and showed it to a friend, who showed it to one of our doodlers—and then this amazing thing happened: talented artists and engineers who liked the idea just started to help!" Wierzbicki said.
For more on Google's doodles, meanwhile, see the slideshow below. One of the company's last popular doodle was a playable image in honor of musician Les Paul, which eventually got its own standalone site. The search giant also celebrated the year's first total lunar eclipse with a doodle that included a live feed of the event.
Recently, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering "systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."
For more from Sara, follow her on Twitter @sarapyin.
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