From his earliest years, Hwang was consumed by art, although frustrated by how it was taught in Korea. Hwang is modest about his celebrity, but admits he gets hundreds of fan e-mails every time a new doodle posts, sometimes thousands if he’s done something “particularly surprising,” he says.Īs we sit in one of high-flying Google’s posh, free-to-employees cafeterias (fennel crème fraîche, anyone?), it’s a tad ironic when Hwang explains that he came to Stanford with “every intention of becoming a starving artist.” Hwang was born in Knoxville, Tenn., but he grew up in Korea, where his father was a professor of environmental geography at the University of Seoul. Hwang, 28, manages a team of 23 people charged with keeping Google’s heavily visited pages technically fit, fast and sleek, but he also has charge of the whimsical drawings that adorn the Google logo on holidays such as Valentine’s Day, special occasions such as the Olympics, and offbeat little commemorations such as artist Edvard Munch’s birthdate. With tens of millions of people viewing Google’s home page daily, the guy who used to design Burbank and Cardenal’s dorm shirts is, in CNN ’s words, “the most famous unknown artist in the world.” Webmaster manager for the search engine powerhouse Google, Hwang is the “Google doodler”-the cartoonist who embellishes the firm’s wide-eyed typographic logo.
And in a near-perfect-not to mention lucrative-pairing of right and left brain (he graduated with a degree in art and a minor in computer science), Hwang is still that guy. “I was that guy,” Dennis Hwang, ’01, says with a grin. the only one you’d trust to design the T-shirt. the infuriatingly smart kid who cuts class to make posters for Big Game and still aces the midterm. The felt-pen caricaturist who embellishes the hallway white board. Every Stanford dorm seems to have that creative, go-to person.
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