23 walls of Googley

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A couple months ago while visiting our London office, I noticed a really cool Google logo on the wall. It was a mosaic of photos of London that had been created by a product manager named Clay Bavor and a team of Googlers (in fact, Clay wrote about it). As a few of us admired the wall, we thought there must be other Googlers who could create something equally cool and fun. So we cooked up a little contest for the product management team: create your own version of a “Googley Art Wall” and the team with the best entry wins a nice dinner out and a donation to the charity of its choice.


When we announced the contest, we weren’t sure if we’d get enough entries to make it interesting. Within minutes of seeing the announcement, however, Lorraine Twohill (head of marketing) and Claire Hughes Johnson (head of online sales) both asked if it was OK for their teams to enter too. Soon Googlers from offices and teams around the world were doing their best to create beautiful, creative and Googley “art walls,” on small budgets and their own time.


Seven weeks later, 23 teams from 12 offices across eight countries submitted videos and photographs of their work. The entries were so universally good that the judges couldn’t limit themselves to picking just one winner. The grand prize went to “Rubik’s Cubes Galore!”, a giant Google doodle meticulously composed of 850 Rubik’s Cubes, created by practically the entire Taipei office. We also named four runners-up: from Mountain View, a “Periodic Table of Google Elements,” a colorful collection of facts and stats about Google and the Internet arranged as a giant periodic table; the “Google Paris Metro Station,” a Metro stop built right inside the Paris office; the “Shanghai Interactive Wall,” a magnetic wall with 63 moveable tiles; and in Dublin, the “Google FoosWall,” a super-sized foosball table with handmade players that spell Google. Watch the video to see the making of these winning walls, along with the finished products.





People sometimes ask me to define “Googley.” Now I can just tell them to walk by any of the newly decorated walls (you should too, if you happen to visit a Google office). This is what happens when you give Googlers a little space—and paint guns, a wood shop, litter scraps from micro-kitchens, stained glass, LEDs, dried beans, colorful plastic balls, antique furniture—or just about anything else they can get their hands on, apparently. They create incredible things.

by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management