Google Doodle Celebrates International Women’s Day 2020

By Amit Chowdhry ● Mar 8, 2020

Google Doodle March 8 2020

  • Google used this image for its International Women’s Day Doodle, which celebrates women coming together throughout the world

Today Google used the image above for its International Women’s Day Doodle. The doodle celebrates women coming together throughout the world with a special animated video. The video features multilayered 3D paper mandala animation — which was illustrated by New York and London-based guest artists Julie Wilkinson and Joyanne Horscroft from Makerie Studio and animated by Zurich-based guest animators Marion Willam & Daphne Abderhalden from DRASTIK GmbH:

 

The black-and-white central layer of the mandala reflects women around the world during the late 1800s to the 1930s amidst labor movements. And the second layer depicts women from the 1950s to the 1980s. The outer layer symbolizes women from the 1990s to the present in the context of progress made from over 100 years of women’s rights movements. 

“We drew a lot of inspiration from the history of International Women’s Day and its humble roots, showing how the movement has grown exponentially over the years. We loved the idea of visually representing the number of women involved in each stage, from the Suffragettes to women today, and portraying how their freedoms gradually expanding as the movement has evolved,” said Makerie Studio.

Plus the video pays tribute to breaking barriers from former cultural and gender roles as women continue to redefine ideas about the roles women take on in society.

“Paper is one of the most labor-intensive materials to work with in 3D. Rebuilding the mandala in 3D probably takes longer than doing it with real paper as you need a lot of calculations to achieve a realistic movement and impression of the paper texture. This mandala consists of 35 characters and three background layers, which are mainly animated like a concertina fan. What really helped us build the mandala was our experience in folding techniques applied in 3D; we were able to build our own 3D extension to cope with the flood of vectors and folds in no less than 650 digital paper layers,” added DRASTIK GmbH.