Google makes a doodle for almost anything that qualifies as an occasion. National days, the birthdays of scientists nobody outside their field has heard of, anniversaries measured in round numbers. Albania’s independence was turning a hundred years old on 28 November, still more than two months out. It had every ingredient the logo usually gets redrawn for: a round centenary, a flag with an actual story in it, a diaspora spread across enough countries to notice if it showed up. So rather than wait and see, I asked directly.
I started a petition addressed to Google, plain and to the point:
Have a doodle for Albania’s 100 Year Anniversary of Independence.
Albania is a small country, but with a big history. The country was suppressed by The Ottoman Empire for 500 years! Yes, 5 centuries. Finally, in November 28th, 1912, it gained its independence.
It would mean a lot for every single Albanian around the world if one of the world’s biggest companies on the Internet recognized our independence, too. Especially because it is a 100 year anniversary.
To make the ask concrete instead of abstract, I built the doodle I was asking for.
I kept it close to the real homepage on purpose. Same wordmark, same position, same grey search box and the same two grey buttons underneath it, untouched. The only change is the flag: not an illustration worked into the letters the way Google usually does it, but the Albanian flag planted above the logo on a pole, the way you’d mark a hundred years of a country existing rather than illustrate it.
I posted both, the petition and the mockup, to my own accounts and shared it as widely as I could to bring in more signatures. It moved. More shares and reactions than anything I’d put out in a while, people tagging friends, signing, asking outright whether the doodle was already real. By the time I sat down to write this, the petition had passed 14,488 signatures, with the actual anniversary still weeks away.
Whether Google ever makes that doodle or not, for one day in a few thousand feeds, it already existed.
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