14 DAY TRIAL // The World Cup has just been wrapped up with Spain’s victory over Holland in the final. It will be four year’s time until the world is taken over by the football craze again. Google couldn’t miss out on the opportunity to showcase one final World Cup-themed doodle. In fact, it ran two different doodles for different countries. Most of the world got the ‘standard’ world cup final doodle while participating countries saw the winner of the first ever global “I love football” doodle competition.
The winner of the global competition is Barbara Szpirglas, 14 from France. Her doodle was chosen from the 17 local finalists and voted by people from around the world. The winning design was adorned on the Google homepages of the 17 countries that were part of the competition on July 11, the day of the World Cup Final. The simple design stands out since it used a colored background, unlike most other submissions.
The winner was chosen from about 35,000 entries in the 17 countries. In the first stage, the best design from each country was selected. The local winners had their works displayed on their local Google homepage. In the second stage, the finalists were pitted against each other and people had about a week to select their favorite. With all of the votes tallied, the global winner was revealed. The winner gets a free trip to South Africa along with her family.
The rest of the world saw the doodle Google created for the World Cup final. It was a pretty standard logo, featuring the flags of the two finalists and a stadium spelling out the Google name. For better or for worse, the World Cup is over and all the hype around it should be dying down. YouTube still has the vuvuzela button on each video, for now, but that should change soon enough.
