“It’s… tricky,” Jessica Yu, the Doodle team lead, tells artnet News while laughing. As a team, they publish several hundred Doodles a year across the world.

Google’s Doodlers, as they’re known-a shifting lineup of dozens of artists, engineers, and product managers based in the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California-work on a platform that averages over five billion searches per day. Most artists dream of garnering an audience of thousands. Your dad probably sends them to you in body-less emails. They’re the subjects of Facebook posts and small talk with colleagues. Now, 21 years and several thousand Doodles later, the daily sketches are the quirky face of one of the world’s most powerful companies. This is how Google Doodles began-and the company, only a few months old, wasn’t even incorporated yet. They considered their “out-of-office” message a public inside joke. So they took Google’s signature logo, which greets visitors to the company’s homepage, and replaced the second “o” with an image of the festival’s icon.

In 1998, Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were on their way to Burning Man and wanted to message their trip to the world.

Today's doodle