For every successful man, there is a strong woman standing behind him.
In the case of Matteo Lopez – the seven-year-old kid whose “doodling” of the Google logo was selected from 107,000 contest entries and today adorns the Google home page – it’s his mom, Maria, a 41-year-old office administrator in San Francisco, near where she, her husband and son live.
“I just never thought, we can’t even express it, we are in shock, it’s unbelievable,” Maria said by phone a few hours after Matteo was announced as the winner. She took a breath. “I have been more nervous than he has been.”
“Google Doodles” are the illustrations that occasionally adorn the search engine’s logo in the U.S. and abroad. As we reported last year, Doodles commemorate holidays, pop-culture touchstones, civic milestones and scientific discovery.
Yesterday, at Google’s office in downtown Manhattan, the company announced the winner of its fourth annual Doodle 4 Google contest, in which students in kindergarten through 12th grade enter on 8.5 x 11” paper their vision of the Google logo. The theme they were asked to hew to was, “What I’d like to do someday.”
The Doodle team at Google, along with judges (including Jeff Kinney, author of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”) whittled the 107,000 entries down to 40 finalists. Those finalists were flown to New York with their parents for yesterday’s awards ceremony.
In an auditorium in Google’s whimsical office, each of the 40 finalists took the stage, with their doodle flashing on large flat screen monitors mounted around the room. Google executive Marissa Mayer introduced each artist and his or her Doodle.
While Matteo took his turn on stage, his mom crouched in an aisle taking pictures. She pressed both hands to her face as her boy descended the stage and ran to her for a hug.
When he was announced as the national winner, Maria texted her husband, Rudy, who had come to New York with his family but was milling about the city because Google permitted one parent only to attend the awards event. “He thought I was joking when I texted him,” says Maria.
Dad joined the group later at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where the doodles of the 40 finalists are on display through June 16. The same exhibit is up at SFMOMA, until July 19.
Matteo is the youngest winner yet. He gets a $15,000 scholarship for college and a $25,000 technology grant given to his school. He wants to be an astronaut.
His doodle – depicting the letters G-O-O-G-L-E as a rocket ship, a meteor, a satellite and an astronaut – decorates the Google home page today.
“The only letter that didn’t come easy was the big G,” says his mom. “Finally he said, ‘Oh I know, I want it to be an alien monster!’” The alien is sticking out its tongue toward the letter O next to it. “He wanted the alien to be slurping the Earth,” Maria says.
Matteo is a second grader at South San Francisco’s Monte Verde Elementary School, which has faced budget cuts and no longer offers art classes as part of the curriculum. His parents pay for him to take art lessons. Next week he starts a cartooning class. “He wants to draw cartoons and we want to keep him interested in art,” Maria says.
Maria read about the Doodle contest online in January and told Matteo about it. She showed him doodles done by kids in past years. He worked for three weeks on his — everyday after school and then both days of the weekend. He was already familiar with the look of the logo because he uses Google Images to look for pictures of characters he likes to draw. “He just thinks Google is a website where you can find cartoons,” his mom says.
After Matteo’s name was announced as the winner, he ran to Maria: “The first thing he said was, ‘Mommy, my school gets a computer lab!’” she says. “He’s a very generous and very giving little boy. He obviously cares about others and that makes me even prouder.”
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